Nursing Hosts Graduation for Second Degree BSN Students

The Second Degree Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program will host its graduation ceremony on Thursday, July 28, at 2 p.m. in the Power Center Ballroom.

A current student and an alumna of the nursing school will deliver remarks at the ceremony. They were selected because each exemplifies the high level of commitment needed to succeed in the rigorous BSN program. In addition, both speakers have personal histories that reveal the power of vocation, even in a person’s middle years.

Cathy Roscoe, a member of the 2010 Second Degree BSN class who is currently employed at UPMC Shadyside, will deliver the keynote address. Growing up, she admired an aunt who was a nurse, but it was a close friend’s fatal illness and her friend’s advice to “do it now because we don’t know what we have coming our way” that compelled Roscoe to pursue a nursing degree.

Roscoe was 38 when she began the program. She has a husband and three sons, the youngest of whom requires special care. “My husband ran the house and the family,” she said. “It was my job to get educated—and fast.”

The student speaker, Alan Drexler, spent 25 years in financial services at BNY Mellon and is the oldest member of the class of 2011. At 51, he has more than two decades on the majority of his classmates.

Like Roscoe, who had a degree in art history, Drexler’s accounting background provided little preparation for nursing study. They both took courses in biochemistry, pharmacology, microbiology and other prerequisites in the months before starting the demanding Second Degree BSN program.

Drexler intends to use his degree as a volunteer, but in the immediate future he will be employed by Allegheny General Hospital, a position offered to him on the spot at a spring job fair. Landing it so long before graduating, though rewarding, did nothing to slow the program’s hectic pace, which offers no respite until after commencement, and that being only short-term rest, as nursing candidates in Pennsylvania and other states must pass a licensing examination.

“We were told that you are going to give up a year of your life. That’s no exaggeration,” Drexler said. “I’ll be honest with you—I don’t know how people with kids do it.”