ROCHESTER, N.Y. – A summer camp at St. John Fisher University is geared specifically toward high schoolers looking to become nurses.

Cardinal Nurse Camp is underway at the college with the hope of encouraging young people to consider jobs to bolster the depleted ranks of healthcare workers.

Sam, a junior at Brighton High School, has big dreams.

“I’ve been wanting to be a nurse for a while and this seemed like a good opportunity to get started,” he said.

Eleanor, a sophomore in Pittsford, thought the same thing.

“I just really want to help people and after COVID, I feel like I learned a lot about how nurses affect people, how important they can be,” she said.

Alexa is going to be a senior and is still deciding on her future, but she’s pretty sure it’ll include helping others.

“I went to my guidance counselor because I wanted to build up my resume for college and so I went to her and said I want to get more experience in the medical field,” Alexa said.

They’re all participating in nurse camp this week at Fisher, getting a firsthand look at what it’s like to be a nurse and what it’ll take to get there.

“I’m expecting to learn the basics of being a nurse, how hard it is to get into nursing school, how to get into nursing schools, and resources you can do to help become a nurse,” Sam said.

Ninety-five percent of the nursing students who graduate from St. John Fisher stay in the Rochester region. These teens are from here, so the hope is they’ll stay too, if they ultimately choose nursing as a career.

“They think they want to be a nurse but they may not understand truly what is nursing, or they’re not sure so the idea of nurse camp is to take rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors in high school, bring them into the college campus, let them understand what does it look like to be on a college campus first and foremost and then introduce them to some early concepts of what does it mean to be a nurse,” said Tricia Gatlin, dean of Fisher’s School of Nursing.

There already aren’t enough nurses in the region to care for the people who need them. So even if they can help some of these high schoolers get to a point where they commit, it’ll be worth it.

“I love helping people and I feel like becoming, working in the medical field has always seemed fun to me,” Sam said.

The campers will also spend a day this week shadowing real nurses at Rochester General Hospital.

If you have a student who might be interested in this kind of camp next summer, more information is available at whec.com.

Contact nursecamp@sjf.edu for more information.

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