Kelly

“I’m so excited about nursing, but school is kinda keeping me back because it’s a lot,” Kelly says.

As a teenager, Kelly Lopez-Valdivia wanted to become a nurse. However, she didn’t know much about the profession, other than that nurses worked in a hospital.

Later, at Benson Polytechnic High School, Kelly studied in the nursing program. While her career goals solidified, the pandemic made her future feel very uncertain.

“Everything just flipped upside down for me” when high school went online, she says. She didn’t get a lot of support preparing for college, and she was working two jobs, at a juice bar and a catering company. The summer of 2021, as college loomed, she started feeling very nervous.

Kelly is a shy person, and her mental health had been poor in high school. She worried that college would overwhelm her, socially and academically. That first term was tough.

“Sometimes I am somewhat motivated for school and then other times, I just can't do it. I bring myself down,” she says. She sometimes misses classes or can’t do her homework. Nevertheless, she does feel like she’s adjusting to PCC, slowly.

“My mental health is a big change from high school to college. It was really bad when I was in high school, and it was pretty bad during the fall term [of 2021],” she says. But things are getting better; one year later, Kelly is finishing her first year at PCC and studying to become a nurse.

One of the reasons she’s most excited for her career path is because it offers so many choices. “I always change my mind, and I feel like I can do that while I’m in nursing,” she says. She’s most interested in working with older people, but knows that a nursing degree will let her care for young kids, people with particular disorders, or work in a hospital or a smaller clinic. Options abound.

Many years of school remain until she becomes an RN. In the meantime, Kelly is keeping herself focused on her goal: “There’s times where I’m like, what am I doing just sitting here in front of a computer? How am I going to learn like this?” she admits. “But my focus is reminding myself of my future and how it’s going to look like.”