At M State, the instructors want to see you succeed – you know the teachers care. That makes the program so completely different than anything I’ve experienced. On my first day of classes, my instructor told us that she already looked at us as RNs, and I knew I was going to love it here.
We get a lot of hands-on experience in our skills labs, our clinicals – that’s the nice thing I’ve noticed about rural hospitals, is that you don’t have specialty nurses to do everything. I’ve seen the clinical paperwork that my friends at other colleges do, and our program is as hard or harder than theirs. I look at my classmates and think, "Wow, we’re going to be a good group of nurses."
Something I’ve found at M State is that every student has a story. At M State, there are people from all walks of life – who have other degrees, who had their kids early, who are minorities. That’s something I value because everybody has a story, yet everyone is seen as an equal at M State.
For eight weeks in the spring of 2020, Ashley Devier was a frontline worker in the coronavirus pandemic, working in a COVID-19 hospital ward in New York City. She will graduate from the Associate Degree Nursing program on the Detroit Lakes campus in December 2020 and plans to pursue bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing and gain experience providing bedside care before continuing her education to become a nurse practitioner.