Senior nursing student Jackie Marzigliano described the hardships and hectic schedule she deals with to fulfill her passion of becoming a nurse. Not only does she have to attend classes like any other college student, but the nursing school also requires labs and clinicals. Fairfield University’s Marion Peckham Egan School of Nursing and Health Studies has a strict schedule of classes that nursing majors must follow each semester. This schedule includes clinicals, such as geriatrics or mental health, that students begin second semester of sophomore year.
Although her major has proven to be tough and time consuming, Marzigliano has shown a passion for nursing. “I love nursing so much, I started tearing up in class,” Marzigliano said of one instance where her emotions showed. She likes spending time at clinicals and told many stories of her encounters. Not only has she experienced the miracle of birth, but she has dealt with many patients diagnosed with mental health problems.
While at her mental health clinical, she was approached by children that said they were “scared” of her red scrubs. She reported this back to the School of Nursing to which they replied that they would work on it. “This year there was a lot of complaints and I guess conflict with the School of Nursing,” Marzigliano said. This conflict was due to the fact that the SON had changed the red scrubs to gray scrubs that now said “Egan School of Nursing” and did not focus on the university as a whole.
New scrubs are not the only change that nursing students have experienced. Due to the construction of a new SON, students’ classrooms have been changed. “A lot of my classes that were in SON 203, the big auditorium, are now in Bannow or squished into some room in McAuliffe,” Marzigliano said. She also explained the difficulty of having a lack of simulation labs due to the construction. “We had to do a simulation lab for pediatrics in the hallway of McAuliffe in September, so that was rough.” Although Marzigliano sees the construction as an inconvenience during her senior year, she is genuinely interested in and still enjoys her classes.
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