It’s long been a point of pride that the Johns Hopkins MSN (Entry Into Nursing) program can count some extreme career changers within its ranks. In my first year on the job I stumbled upon a woman who was a former airplane mechanic, in the second a man who was a salmon fisher in Alaska, and I kept hearing about a man who had been a Cirque du Soleil performer. I wanted to share their stories and sent out a request by email to all the current cohorts of the program asking if they had changed careers and wanted to participate in the feature, and if so to send a photo of themselves in the former career and as a nursing student, and a blurb about the decision to change.
I got enough submissions for two blogs (Blog #2 was delayed until the end of year wrap up thanks to COVID). I love weight loss before and after’s, so I modeled the submissions into a simple, two-photo before and after grid. The feature included a blog, tweets, and instagram posts created separately (Facebook and LinkedIn got the same story as Twitter). As it happens, it was a leap year, so that was the perfect day to launch the feature as “Take the Leap into Nursing!”