A healthcare-related experience or interaction that deepened your interest in studying Nursing

BSN Nursing Application

This is my undergrad nursing school essay application. The prompt is: Tell us about a healthcare-related experience or another significant interaction that deepened your interest in studying Nursing , in roughly 250 words (mine is currently 264, but is still okay for the word limit). Thank you!

When I was younger, I naively assumed that doctors were the only people who treated patients. That changed in 2009 when I was nine years old. That year, my mom was diagnosed with a very rare tumor. In fact, we were later told that there have only been six to twelve such recorded cases in all of medical history. As a result of its rarity, the Chairman of Johns Hopkins' Surgical Oncology Department agreed to treat her. There were, mercifully, two happy results to this traumatic experience; my mom was cured and I learned much about the work of hospital nurses. What was fascinating to me was that every nurse was passionate about their job and the wellbeing of everyone, not just their patients. I specifically remember an extremely early morning when a nurse who had treated my mother stopped to talk to us on her way out of the hospital. I remember her tired eyes and large smile comforting me. She was clearly going home from a night shift, yet she still decided to take time to talk to us. Although she worked in a completely different side of the hospital, she would always stop by to say hello to us. Her small act of kindness really made my day, every day, during the most difficult period in my life. I want to be a nurse to help better the lives of others in emulation of that one nurse. One nurse made the difference in my life, and I want to devote my life to helping others, as many others have done before me.

Jess , let me stop you right now with the development of this essay. Under absolutely no circumstance can you use your chosen age as the epiphany reference in this essay. The reviewer will read that as an exaggeration and immediately think that you are writing a work of fiction in response to the prompt in order to create an impression. If you are not old enough to sit on on the doctor's appointment, you are definitely too young to have that eye opening and future developing realization. You can still use the story of your mother, but you need to revise the presentation to be of a more believable age on your part. Say you were 15 or 16, that would be acceptable, 9 years old is just too unbelievable and will harm your application. Stick with simply saying, "when I was younger". That way you create a generic age reference in the situation that can be immediately overlooked and not necessarily questioned by the reviewer.

The story about the nurse is not convincing enough. We are talking about a nurse performing her task in a medical setting. While she did go out of her way to make you and your mother feel comfortable, there was nothing in that incident that stood out as something that could have truly created an impact and influenced you to become a nurse. If you had spoken about how your mother responded to the nurses treating her and how they made her treatments more bearable, which would have created a more interesting impression and truly influenced your decision to become a nurse, then the inclusion of that story would have been more acceptable.