Hollie Braband remembers when she made the decision to be a nurse. She was all of 5. She’ll shortly graduate from the University of Texas at Arlington and begin a career specializing in neonatal intensive-care nursing.

“I’ve always known I wanted to work with children,” Braband said.

Then there’s Jackline Opollo, originally of Kenya, a brilliant UT-Arlington graduate nursing student with a 4.0 grade-point average and an admitted obsession about global health issues.

“Growing up in a culture of poverty, I didn’t perceive my situation as that of deprivation,” Opollo said. “My perspective was totally changed when I immigrated to the United States and began comparing educational opportunities in Kenya to the U.S.”

Opollo seized those opportunities. Now nearing completion of a master’s degree in nursing and public health management, she made a not-so-simple pledge to become “a force to be reckoned with in the world of today’s global healthcare intellectuals.”

Or consider Amy Cooper, a nursing student at UT-Arlington who has two sisters attending college.

“Paying for school has been my responsibility for four years,” said Cooper, who nevertheless takes a full-time class load and somehow manages to make good grades while also working part time as a waitress. She plans to specialize in critical care as an emergency room nurse practitioner.

Braband, Opollo and Cooper all have something in common besides being nursing students at UT-Arlington. All three will eventually be warmly welcomed in a field with substantial shortages, in Texas and across the nation. All three can take their pick of a dozen or more offers. They also share another characteristic.

“They’ve all benefited as recipients of Dream Makers scholarships,” said Elizabeth Poster, dean of the UTA School of Nursing.

A few years ago Poster noted the steadily escalating costs of college tuition and sympathized with financial and time management problems so many nursing students were experiencing. The curriculum is heavy on science and medicine, requiring long hours with the books and labs. It’s difficult and time-consuming, yet many students also have to hold down jobs to finance their dream.

Poster came up with an idea that was simple in concept and almost ludicrously difficult in execution: find scholarship money for all nursing students in good academic standing.

“Dream Makers began as a way to assist students with $1,000 scholarships so they could work less and devote more of their time to studying, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will successfully complete their program, graduate and be competent new graduate RNs,” Poster said.

Though providing scholarships for everyone seemed an unlikely possibility, darned if the idea didn’t take off.

“Over the last five years we raised $700,000, all of it going directly to students, either as direct stipends or endowment scholarships,” Poster said.

How is it done? Poster and other faculty members at the School of Nursing have persuaded the health industry and scores of healthcare professionals that if they want more nurses — and they do — they need to invest dollars in the form of scholarships. They’re doing it.

The scholarships are awarded at an annual Dream Makers luncheon; the next one is March 5 at UT-Arlington.

There may be other public universities where every student making the grade earns a scholarship, but it hasn’t surfaced. Dream Makers has become what may well be the most unique medical scholarship program for nursing in the country.

For more information, call 817-272-2529.

This entry was posted by Taman Siswa on Sunday, February 25, 2007 at 6:02 am and is filed under Education News, Scholarship. Tags: College, Education News, Scholarship, Student, Study, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.