Why I Became a Nurse: Second-Career Nurses Share Their Stories
PhD, RN
Miriam Bender is founding director of UC Irvine’s Center for Nursing Philosophy, the first such center in the United States. “I entered UCI in 1984 as a premed and got to come back in 2014 as nursing faculty,” she enthuses. “How cool is that? I’m so grateful and proud.”
Bender had wanted to be a nurse since high school. She even got certified as a nursing assistant, but “the worse advice I ever got in my life” persuaded her toward medicine. She found she enjoyed the science but disliked the competitiveness between students.
Graduating in bioscience, Bender moved to Switzerland and then to Denver, Colorado, accompanying her then-partner. In both locations, she found satisfying work on laboratory-based research projects, but after a further move to San Francisco, paused paid work to bring up her children. Finally, living in San Diego with both children in school, she realized her chance to become a nurse had arrived.
After qualifying with a master’s, Bender became the first-ever clinical nurse leader on her unit, introducing an effective new model on which she became expert. After subsequently completing a PhD, the limitations of the hospital structure began to chafe.
“I made as much of a difference as I could clinically and when I couldn’t do any more, I moved into academia,” she says. “Here, I feel empowered to continue to make the case for nursing.”
Assistant Professor Christopher Cleary
DNP, PMHNP-BC
Christopher Cleary is a psychiatric nurse practitioner with particular focus on LGBTQ mental wellbeing. In addition to his private therapeutic practice, he’s a member of clinical faculty at both the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing and UC Davis. He says of the time he took to reach his current position:
“I don’t see those as lost years. They were years of discovery.”
In his twenties, without a particular career in mind, Cleary worked in healthcare insurance administration and clinical support services,
including as the manager of a call center. When he decided to qualify as a registered nurse, he brought with him years of experience of working with clinicians in the context of managed care.
As a nurse, Cleary developed expertise in quality management and utilization, while continuing to consider his future direction. Increased understanding of his own motivation eventually led him to psychiatric nursing, following a Doctorate in Nursing Practice in 2017.
“I loved teaching, I loved talking to families, I loved hospital social work,” he recalls. “I used to think it was about communication, but I more recently realized that connection is my purpose. Nursing has served that role. I feel connection with patients, with students, with the wider community, with myself.”
JORGE MONTES
MS
Jorge Montes always wanted to work in healthcare:
“I have always chosen front-facing roles with everyday people,” he says. Unfortunately, as a teenage student at UCLA his ambition was dimmed when he struggled with math and science. Determined to succeed at his degree—he was the first member of his family to obtain a bachelor’s—he pivoted to his favorite subject from high school days. He got a BA in History and became a social sciences teacher.
Montes worked in a high school he loved, in a community that, he says, “people might describe as rough in terms of socioeconomic status, food insecurity, housing insecurity. One thing I learned very early on was that a majority of the students I taught had bigger concerns than the things I was trying to teach them.”
“Even though I loved what I did,” says Montes, “after seven or eight years I started to feel unfulfilled.”
He left teaching for a master’s in nursing, choosing it over medicine in part for its high patient contact. “It’s almost like I needed to show my teenage self I could do it,” he reflects. He now works in ICU, one of the highest patient contact areas of all. Academically and as a person, he feels he’s in a profession where he will continue to grow.
BRITTANY PRIETO
MS (’25)
Brittany Prieto was, and remains, a high school softball coach. She was invited to take up the role while working as an applied behavioral analyst for a school system, assigned students who needed one-on-one assistance to get them through the school day.
Prieto already had a BSc and was trained in her student support position by the school nurse. “As the years progressed,” she says, “I got more and more students, with more and more medical needs. I thought, I want to know more about how to help them.” In September 2023, she entered the master’s program at the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing.
Prieto finds her nursing studies illuminate her ongoing coaching work. She cites examples of teenagers unable to verbalize their problems or exhibiting rebellious behavior and other signs of mental distress that she now feels more confident to identify and tackle.
In terms of her nursing career, she’s drawn to pediatric and psychiatric specialties—but she’s not giving up coaching any
time soon.
“As a coach, you can really change the trajectory of someone’s life,” she says. “Teenagers can stop listening to their parents because their mentality is, ‘My mom and dad have to love me.’ When someone else shows them they care, it incentivizes them to do better.”
ANKIT SHAH
JD, MPH, MS (’25)
Ankit Shah’s original decision to become a lawyer was influenced by a dramatic series of events.
As a philosophy student on the first day of a law internship, he was called to the phone to help communicate with a Hindi-speaking victim of domestic abuse. The caller escaped her situation with the help of Shah’s family and is happily remarried; they are still in touch. Shah felt the legal profession had called to him.
Having passed the bar, however, he was frustrated by the slow pace of legal work, and by the difficulty of surviving financially on the types of cases he wanted to take. He’d always been interested in healthcare—
his mother is a nurse—but had feared the limits of his scientific abilities.
“I thought, I’m older now, maybe I’m smarter,” he explains. “Let me take a class, just to see if I can even get through it.”
Small successes brought confidence, and Shah also started volunteering at a hospital. “Out of all healthcare professionals,” he observes, “nurses spent the most time with the patients, had the most meaningful relationships with them.” He went back to school to get a master’s in nursing.
It’s been a happy decision. “I feel almost like a kid in a candy shop,” he says of the options available in nursing. “I am so grateful that life has brought me to this position.”
ARIADNE MEYERS,
MSN, PhD
“I was passionate about it for a long time,” says Ariadne Meyers of her former career as an actress. “Then the bad started to outweigh the good. I started to want something with less focus on what’s external.”
Meyers’ first career change led to her founding and running a non-profit organization for young people, getting involved with children growing up in foster care, and eventually volunteering in hospitals. “I found I didn’t really want to do anything else but help people,” she recalls.
Meyers is now a post-partum maternity nurse and lactation consultant with Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center Torrance in Los Angeles. She has embarked on a PhD with the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing, having always been “interested in scholarly work. I was a philosophy and theatre major for my first degree, so I like asking ‘why?’”
Her PhD study involves focusing on the systemic frustrations nurses face as they seek to provide their best care. Nonetheless, in Meyers’ daily work she still finds the joy that first brought her to the profession.
“I love babies,” she says. “Sometimes I’m changing that first diaper and I think, Who will you be? Will I run into you later in your life and know that I met you the very moment you were born?”
RESEARCH ROUNDUP
PhD Research: Burnout – Changing the paradigm
More than 10 years’ experience as a nurse have fueled Natalie Nguyen’s determination to “contribute to the discussion about moral injury and burnout.” Nguyen has observed a decade’s worth of wellbeing initiatives designed to reduce burnout-related attrition from the nursing workforce. Meanwhile, rates of burnout continued to increase, and the related concept of moral injury, originally associated with the armed forces, has been introduced to describe a wider sense of anguish and disillusionment felt by healthcare workers placed in circumstances that make their jobs impossible to do well.
The supposition with which Nguyen begins her PhD at the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing—completion due 2027 —is that the sources of, and solutions to, moral injury in the workplace are not necessarily centered in the individual. She seeks to examine structural and organizational issues in U.S. hospitals and their relation to moral injury in nurses.
Nguyen’s work builds on the National Framework for Addressing Burnout and Moral Injury in the Health and Public Safety Workforce, published by the Workplace Change Collaborative (WCC) in 2023. Accepting the WCC’s definitions, she focuses on moral injury as a process related to but distinct from burnout, and has zeroed in on the four relational drivers of moral injury identified: distrust, value conflict, inequity and lack of control.
What I hope will come of this work is an increased willingness on the part of those with power in an organization to discuss the impact of decisions that are in their hands. In the end, as a nurse I want to ensure my patients’ safety and comfort. These are everyday things.
Natalie Nguyen
The depletion of the healthcare professions through burnout has been a serious issue for so long that students are aware of the danger even before they enter education. Nursing students at the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing were keen to be involved as researchers on Nguyen’s project. With Nguyen, students Lindsey Blake, Cody Allen Palisoc Navarro, Olivia Liuson and Tiana Luong are engaged in a comprehensive review of all literature on organizational leadership, moral injury and burnout in relation to the four WCC-defined relational drivers: more than 1,000 references.
When this review is complete—and with additional student researchers coming on board—Nguyen seeks to interrogate nurses’ experience of professional values conflict via a mixed method study. This involves collaboration with a multi-state professional organization of 35,000 healthcare personnel, supplemented with qualitative interviews.
“It’s a big task to change a paradigm,” she says. “What I hope will come of this work is an increased willingness on the part of those with power in an organization to discuss the impact of decisions that are in their hands. In the end, as a nurse I want to ensure my patients’ safety and comfort. These are everyday things.”
New models in nursing
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) has shown that an innovative care model introducing a new level of qualified nurse leadership —the Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL)— helps create demonstrably better work environments in accordance with the NAM’s definitions.
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) has called for research that will help specify effective changes to healthcare settings to reduce workforce burnout. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) has shown that an innovative care model introducing a new level of qualified nurse leadership —the Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL)— helps create demonstrably better work environments in accordance with the NAM’s definitions. However, it is yet to be shown whether reduced nurse burnout at the individual level is one of the positive impacts of the CNL workplace model. Ariadne Meyers, a nurse working in women and children’s health, is using her PhD with the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing to carry out this analysis.
“The experience of Covid brought my topic into focus,” says Meyers. “To combat burnout, we are constantly urged to increase individual resilience when it is well known that the problems are systemic. The CNL is a nurse-led solution, and I’m interested in what nurses can do for each other.”
Minoritized nurses
Heather Abrahim’s PhD, Nursing in the Pandemic: Racism, Working Conditions, and Psychological Well-Being Among Minoritized Nurses, contributes to the body of available information about potential burnout factors for specific categories of nursing professional.
In September 2020, National Nurses United published a blistering report, Sins of Omission, on the impact of the first months of the Covid pandemic on nurses’ health and mortality in the United States. One of the report’s eight key findings is that Filipino nurses were dying of Covid in disproportionate numbers, accounting for 31.5% of nurses’ Covid deaths at that date, while representing only 4% of U.S. nurses overall.
Abrahim was at the time a bedside nurse at Jacobs Medical Center, University of California San Diego Health. Her preliminary research for a PhD at UC Irvine’s Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing had halted abruptly when pandemic restrictions made it impossible to test interventions on the wards. She switched her focus to the experience of Filipino nurses, who appeared to be taking the brunt of a healthcare crisis that was testing everyone to their limit.
“I wanted to bring in the racism piece as well,” she says, “because a lot of people don’t think about anti-Asian racism, especially in nursing, and especially relating to Filipino nurses.”
“I wanted to bring in the racism piece as well,” she says, “because a lot of people don’t think about anti-Asian racism, especially in nursing, and especially relating to Filipino nurses.
Abrahim’s interest in the experience of Filipino nurses in the U.S. began earlier in her career, during five years’ service as a Navy Nurse. She learned that the post-World War II
U.S. administration in the Philippines had implemented a system of nursing education that mirrors the U.S. curriculum and structure. For eight decades, this has enabled the U.S. to import Filipino nurses seamlessly to supplement its healthcare needs, and the Philippines to export nurses globally. At UC San Diego Health, where Abrahim now works as a nurse educator, more than half the nurses identify as Filipino.
Diversity-separated data relating to nurses during Covid is scarce, and material that recognizes a Filipino subgroup within the category of Asian is even scarcer. Abrahim supplemented with personal accounts published online by Filipino nurses in the U.S.. Her scoping review of the literature addressing the psychological wellbeing of racial and ethnic minority nurses during the pandemic appeared in Nursing Outlook (2023).
The findings of her PhD include a positive association between racial microaggressions and pandemic-related nursing experiences, and symptoms of traumatic stress, depression, anxiety and functional impairment in nurses. Abrahim emphasizes the need for further research to understand the challenges faced by Filipino nurses and develop strategies to reduce racial microaggressions.
“Filipino nurses are all over the world,” she says. “Whatever can be made known about their wellbeing is going to be widely relevant.”
