UCI alum Katrina Lazarte, MPH, MSN, has always had a love for helping and educating others. But finding what she truly wanted to do was a challenge.
After graduating from high school, she made forays into physical therapy and community health on the west and east coasts.
While she enjoyed what she did, she just couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing.
A fateful meeting
Lazarte longed for a clinical aspect in her career. She contemplated a career in nursing, but decided to pursue public health. After eight years in San Francisco, she moved to its sister city, Boston, for her Master’s in Public Health (MPH).
There she interned at Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights and worked at a local government agency.
While doing advocacy work in Boston she met a nurse who showed her how to integrate her passion for public health and nursing.
“She was so inspiring” remembers Lazarte. “I realized nursing could be a little bit of everything.”
Shortly after completing her MPH, Katrina applied to nursing school in Boston.
Plans put on hold
While she was attending nursing school in Boston, Lazarte’s dad became sick with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves.
She left school and stayed with him in the intensive care unit (ICU) for two months.
There, she truly saw her future for the first time.
“Being with my dad, I learned from the ICU nurses and saw how different it was from working in the community,” she says.
“They were so patient and empathetic. The way they interacted with my dad was what I could see myself doing.”
Going back to nursing school
Lazarte’s dad eventually fully recovered after six months of painstaking therapy. “You’d never know he had been sick,” she says.
Once again, she set her sights on nursing school and applied to the Master’s Entry Program in Nursing (MEPN) at the School of Nursing. MEPN is a program for nursing students who have a bachelor’s degree. They attend classes alongside undergraduate nursing students.
While studying for her nursing degree, she took on volunteer opportunities in the medical intensive care unit and the cardiac ICU at UCI Medical Center.
The volunteer work paid off: Today, she’s a nurse at UCI Health where she gets to use all of her past experiences to help patients.
“This is right on point with what I’ve been missing. I feel it when I’m able to work with a patient and have a connection with them,” Lazarte says.
Most meaningful is when she works with patients diagnosed with Guillain-Barre.
“They ask me if it will get better, and I can share what my dad went through. You can see how much it impacts them,” she says. “It’s pretty fulfilling to me.”
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