Cover Letter

On the postpartum unit during one of my clinical rotations, I detected a heart murmur while assessing a newborn within the same hour the baby was scheduled to be discharged. The nurse I was shadowing, Tanisha, did not hear the murmur herself, but she trusted my assessment and reported my finding to the physician, and the discharge was held when the murmur was confirmed. Afterward she sought out my clinical instructor to tell her how proud she was that I had found it and stayed true to my instincts. I am applying to your Nurse Residency Program, with the NICU and PICU as my unit preferences, because that moment captured everything I want my nursing career to be, and because I have spent my life preparing for it.

My NICU rotation was where I felt most at home. The nurse I shadowed, Mags, watched me complete a head-to-toe assessment, trusted me to hold, feed, and help care for the babies, and told me plainly that I belonged on the team and could tell how at home I felt. On my pediatric rotation, across the PICU and hematology/oncology units, I watched a nurse explain every step to a frightened parent before touching the child, and I understood that in pediatric critical care the parents are the patient too. In all, 640 of my 902 clinical hours, more than seventy percent, were spent inside Magnet-recognized academic medical centers, an opportunity I know is rare and one that shaped the nurse I have become. There I saw nurses take pride in their care, supported by care partners, a lift team, and respiratory therapists who moved as one team; that atmosphere is what patients deserve, and referrals from the nurses who watched me work accompany this application.

The moment I graduated with my BSN in August 2026, I proved that commitment. Within weeks I earned my PALS, ACLS, and NRP certifications to be ready for the smallest and sickest patients from my first day. I then moved home to Chicago temporarily to gain more newborn experience at the birth center where my mother practices, working outpatient and performing hands-on delivery and postpartum recovery and teaching new mothers to latch. I also led an evidence-based practice project on skin-to-skin contact to improve breastfeeding rates after discharge, appraising six studies and translating them into a unit-level pilot, and I found it fascinating: evidence-based practice is what nursing is all about, the only way to give truly well-rounded care. I am eager to join a team that prioritizes EBP and continuous improvement, because it means I can take pride in knowing my patients receive the best, most current care there is.

Children have been my passion for as long as I can remember. I was homeschooled, and at seven I was already a mother’s helper for the families around us. That same year I asked to volunteer beside my mother in our church’s infant nursery, became Red Cross CPR certified for infants and children to lend credence to my name, and never missed a Sunday. I babysat throughout middle school, became an after-school nanny in high school, and in college became the live-in nanny for a boy born three months premature, from the morning he came home from the hospital at four pounds. For three years I learned his cues before he could speak, taught him ASL, coordinated four different weekly therapies, and steadied his parents through a later autism diagnosis. He taught me what medically fragile children and exhausted families need from the person at the bedside, and it is why the NICU and PICU feel like home rather than a specialty. At the Child Development Institute in Reseda I led weekly art and story time and helped conduct developmental assessments.

My mother is a midwife who fought to make midwifery legal in Illinois and later served as President of the Midwives Alliance of North America. Because of her, I attended my first home birth at eight, and from then on I was thirsty to learn everything about birth, babies, and children. I helped however I could, from reheating food for the family to cleaning out the birthing tub with a fishing net, and once the older children were asleep I stood as close to the birth as anyone would allow. Children, babies, and parents are my passion. She taught me that it is never wrong to stand up for what is right, and I carried that into my cohort. As elected Class Representative I was our liaison to faculty, meeting with our program director and the university provost on every concern a classmate raised. When a course had drawn years of complaints without change, I gathered my cohort’s concerns, brought them forward with documentation, and kept pressing until the course was restructured for every cohort after mine. I now serve as President-elect of our American Association for Men in Nursing chapter and a member of Sigma Theta Tau.

The vision I hold for nursing, to heal one patient at a time by improving health, alleviating suffering, and delivering acts of kindness, is the care I have watched and given my whole life, and relationship-based care, a partnership among nurse, patient, and family, is already how I practice. Every clinical instructor and professor I trained under, no matter the course, recommended the same units for me: an ICU, and for my pediatric and obstetric instructors, the NICU or even the PICU, because they could see where my heart belonged. What I bring to your NICU and PICU is a new graduate whose assessments have been trusted by experienced nurses, who is certified and ready, and who has spent her life at the bedside of children and newborns. I would be honored to join your team. Thank you for your consideration.