Student nurse Kelly Hunt joins us this week on the show. She is the current National Student Nurses Association president and a nursing student at the University of North Florida. On Nursing Notes Live this month we will look at how nurses give back to their communities and the world. What advice does she have to other nursing students to excel in nursing school? Find out coming right up!

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Jamie Davis:         Hi, Kelly, I want to welcome you to Nursing Notes Live. It’s great to have you here on the show. I understand you just finished up your finals for this semester, so congratulations on getting through another semester of nursing school.

Kelly Hunt:           Thank you. Thank you so very much. I’m really proud that I finished nice and strong. I’m seeing everyone else finishing up on social media and just being so excited about it. It’s a great feeling and we’re looking for it till the next chapter.

Jamie:                   So you move on into your fourth semester of nursing school coming up and you’ll be finishing up in the spring?

Kelly:                    That’s correct. I’ll be graduating hopefully July 2015.

Jamie:                   Fantastic. That’s exciting. So I always ask the people that I have here on the show the first question of why you wanted to become a nurse. Even as a nursing student, that’s an important question to ask. So what’s the answer for you?

Kelly:                    Why did I want to become a nurse? I think a lot of people know that they want to be a nurse right away when they’re young. I think a lot of people look up to nurses. It’s a wonderful well-respected profession. But I did not always know. This is a second career for me. Before coming to nursing school, I actually worked as a corporate manager and a trainer for Starbucks for about 10 years. I have an experience where I ended up – I had an unexpected hospital stay. And my family was not able to be with me and my husband, who is a Captain in the United States Marine Corps, he was away, he was not able to be with me. And it was kind of traumatic because I ended up being admitted to the CV-ICU feeling very vulnerable, feeling very scared. I actually met a nurse, who was just so kind and so wonderful and so supportive. This is what nurses do every single day, but when you’re the patient and the tables are turned, it’s crazy the impact that it can have on you. Right at that point, when that event occurred, I was ready for a career change and I was on track to go to pharmacy school. After I had that experience, I really thought about it. I spoke with my husband and I said, “I just don’t think pharmacy is for me. I think nursing would be more appropriate because there’s so much connection at the bedside and what that nurse did for me, I would like to do that for other people. I think that would really make me happy.” So that’s kind of how the nursing journey began for me.

Jamie:                   That’s such a great story. You’re not alone on that. People have wanted to be a nurse since they were little, and used to play nurse, or there are people like you that wanted to become a nurse because of a contact with a nurse in their life – may be a neighbor or a family member or through a hospital stay where a nurse really touched them. And I think that that’s important for all of us to keep in mind as nurses, like you said that personal contact at the bedside is such an important...