The greatest strength of my application to your distinguished master's program in Nursing at the University of XXXX is that I am both a nurse and fully bilingual and bicultural. I am a Mexican woman dedicated to addressing the nursing needs of the underserved. I have deep roots and broad connections in my local, mostly Latino, community here in Michigan, and I have even served as a translator for doctors' visits. Hospital stays for people in my neighborhood.
I am happily married to a 12-year-old boy who is increasingly becoming an independent adolescent, needing his mother less and less. Thus, I am at the optimal point to give my all to nursing school and excel. I have worked hard to get where I am, balancing family and professional responsibilities. In 2002, I became a Medical Assistant and continued to study nursing part-time, earning my Associate's in 2009. My first position as a nurse was in a Medical ICU; then, I transferred to another hospital, where I worked in a general telemetry unit for the last 2.5 years. I just recently finished my BSN in May of 2014.
I was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and moved to Southern California when I was eighteen. I have been going to school my entire life. After getting married, we lived in three states, California, then Arizona, and now we have made our home in Michigan. I am pleased that I earned a degree in these three states, and I am confident that everything I have learned so far will help empower me to excel in nursing at the University of Michigan. Since I am 36 years old, I have had a lot of practice in English, and I now speak English very well, often even dreaming in English.
I look forward to becoming increasingly engaged with my Spanish-speaking community, helping to better educate our members about the unique challenges we face as Latinos fighting diabetes and other chronic diseases. I seek to address how Latino cultures often perpetuate poor lifestyle choices, particularly in our diets. I have the passion, commitment, and perseverance to excel as a Family Nurse Practitioner and serve my community excellently, mainly because I am passionate about helping people in need. I hope to learn a great deal in your program at the U of M. I particularly look forward to studying the intersections between nursing, on the one hand, and chronic diseases such as diabetes, HIV, and cancer, on the other, particularly for communities of low socioeconomic status, exploring questions of diversity and justice in healthcare.
As a healthcare professional, I seek to be a good role model for the Latino community. Many factors work against Latinos for health education, working in minimum-wage, fast food jobs, for example. Latino parents often work up to three jobs to make ends meet, and their children suffer. These children end up at home, eating the most unhealthy/cheap fast food watching TV, or playing video games.
As an FNP, I will focus on childhood obesity among recent Latino immigrants. Here in Michigan, the Latino community is concentrated in small pockets such as XXXX County, where I reside. Many are undocumented, which correlates very heavily with the underuse of healthcare services. The children do not have Medicaid or other state-funded healthcare services. Often, prenatal care is absent because these people do not understand the healthcare system.