Our school of nursing is young, established as an independent school within UCI just five years ago. As such, it is invested with an invigorating energy that is conjured in the campus’s motto: “A brilliant future.”
That future pertains to our students, of course, but also – in our hopes and our determination – to the world that they, as nurses, will contribute to creating. For as nurses, our first loyalty is always to our profession and its mission of better health for all people.
In this issue of our newsletter, we hear from some of the alumni who have already begun to make an impact as nurses, teachers, advocates, healers, experts and leaders. I am struck, reading their stories, by the same sense of vigorous purpose that attracted me to the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing to take up my role as dean this year.
The passion of Pat Patton, Candice Whealon and Nicki Yamashiro for their work springs from the page: “I love the profession of nursing and being a nurse practitioner so much,” says Jeffrey Vu, in as simple and joyful an expression of vocation as I have ever read, “that I have always said I would work for free every day if I could!”
Our mission, as a school, is to help provide the world with nurses like these: nurses who are doing work that the world needs done, for their love of doing it. Every one of these alumni, I believe, would agree that the brilliant future they most desire – the one they are working towards – is first and foremost for the patients and communities they serve.
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