Westmont Nursing Club fosters future leaders
Maddy Riddle, Caroline Carlson and Jillian Geist, co-leaders of the Nursing Club
February 8, 2023
An exciting new club has arrived at Westmont College … the Nursing Club! With the introduction of Westmont’s post graduate Nursing Program in downtown Santa Barbara, the leaders of this program expressed interest in creating a resource for current undergraduate students on the pre-nursing track. Dr. Di Hoffman, who works at Westmont downtown and leads Westmont’s Nursing Program, offered this opportunity to students Jillian Geist, Maddy Riddle and Caroline Carlson who expressed a personal desire to initiate the club.
In collaboration with Dr. Hoffman, the club was introduced at this spring’s “Clubs and Cupcakes” club fair event where interested students were recruited to join and participate in the club’s future activities. Geist, Riddle and Carlson have many goals for the club, including bringing in speakers from different areas of nursing, such as emergency, labor and delivery, and pediatric, so that students can gain a varied sense of the possibilities that are available. Carlson hopes that the club can help inform students about the resources available to them through Westmont’s Nursing Program.
Carlson says, “We want to give students more information and get them excited about the program. The Nursing Club aims to build a community for students interested in the program so that when they enter Westmont downtown, there is already a strong cohort of people formed who are passionate about what they are doing.”
Other than bringing in speakers, Geist, Riddle and Carlson hope to take the club on field trips to Westmont’s downtown campus so that students can visualize where they will train to become nurses in the future.
Carlson also plans to “create a Bible study that we will go through every time we meet. The goal is to cultivate relationships. Faith combined with a passion for caring about people is extremely important and amazing to witness. If we can shape and grow our faith so that later down the line we can show it to the people we care for, we could deeply impact patients’ lives.” The Nursing Club is an incredible outlet to foster this sense of unity with God and peers, applying faith in tangible ways.
The Club involves many students who are approaching nursing from different tracks. The common approach many students take is to complete the pre-nursing prerequisites in four years and graduate with any undergraduate degree of one’s choosing, then entering the nursing program. However, Westmont also created a fast track program to graduate in three years, taking some summer classes to enter the program in the eighth semester. This is significant because tuition scholarships transfers over, allowing students to plan their schedule based on personal needs. Carlson shares, “Maddy, Jillian and I are super excited to get Westmont more involved with the program. We have a unique student body, and if we combine our faith with nursing, we could make a big impact on the Santa Barbara community and the world as a whole.”