Nursing with a Purpose
Written and Photographed by Hope, March 26, 2025
Annette Owen
Coming from an outside view, I always hear of the hard work nursing majors have to go through, whether it is clinicals, classes or huge tests. This made me wonder why a student would choose this major when it is so difficult and when they have to work hard on everything.
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Now some of us might wonder what the mental and physical labor of a nursing major is. The answers to that came from junior nursing major, Annette Owen.
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A passion for nursing started back in high school for Owen. She could have gone down one of two routes: teaching or nursing.
“They’re pretty similar in the sense that they’re both in the health profession and they’re both pretty hard, mentally and emotionally,” Owen said.
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What really drew Owen in high school to her decision on nursing was an anatomy and physiology course in senior year because she enjoyed the science aspect. But that was the high school reasoning. In college, her reasoning became more than just a course.
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“After college, I wanted to go to the mission field for at least a few years,” Owen said. “Helping people physically with the nursing aspect then also spiritually goes well together because, once you help people physically and emotionally, then they are more likely to hear.”​
Now here at Union, Owen is working hard as she gets through classes, tests and clinicals - which is putting into practicing what they have learned in a real-world setting. They end up staying in the hospital for about six to eight hours.​
With the hard work Owen is putting in, there are still some skills that she wishes to gain.​
“I hope to become more caring in the process and learn how to recognize needs and meet them for people,” Owen said.
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​Now it might not seem terribly draining going into the hospital, or if you are like me, you don’t realize they are working with real people in real situations. From what Owen had told me, it can sometimes be emotionally draining.
“Just because you're working with older people, you're seeing how sometimes they don't have family, so they're the only people taking care of themselves,” Owen said. ​
She even mentioned that sometimes being in the hospital can make you forget the reality of what is happening. ​
“It’s like life and death is mixed,” Owen said. “Like they play a happy song and then like 20 minutes later somebody is dying.”
​On top of the time warp, Owen mentioned that nurses do a lot of tedious work that needs to be done, which brings in a challenge.​
“There's a lot of things you have to do and sometimes if you're not careful, you forget that you're trying to take care of a person while keeping an open mind,” Owen said. “I've seen nurses who've been there for like 30 years, and they are burned out and hate their job and don't really take care of the patient as the patient.”​
Now that’s a challenge that can happen during the actual job, but while at Union, Owen had named a
whole different challenge, and that is getting through the nursing school in general.​
This could be from all the tests in a classroom setting, to going to the hospital for clinicals and staying there hours on end learning a lot of information to even difficult patients. ​
Even though nursing is a challenge in itself, there’s still positive things that come from it, such as the memories and connections with other students.​
“As a whole court, we have become tight mostly because of the trauma, but you also see how each other have grown,” Owen said. “My cohort, they're very good at encouraging each other.”
Because she said that she has seen how her cohort has grown, I then wanted to know how she feels she has grown herself within the last three years. ​
“I became more assertive with things I've had trouble with, such as taking the lead if nobody volunteers and like being more confident in what I do,” Owen said. “I've seen myself also just taking responsibility for things and being a better friend to other people.”​
While persevering and being more than halfway done with undergrad, Owen knows she needs to start thinking about what happens next.​
Right now, after college, Owen’s is wanting to do the journeyman program with the International Mission Board (IMB). This would be a two year mission trip that she would get to go on, where people would trust them with their lives as well as getting an opportunity to show God's love to them.​
How would she do this though? Easy, by taking care of them whether it is teaching kids, helping with community development, volunteering, etc. There is so much this program offers and it allows Owen to show love and care to God’s people.​
Even though journeyman is just a two year program, Owen still has an idea what she would want to do after.​
“Eventually I want to be a nurse practitioner and work with low end women and children. Either in Jackson or somewhere else,” Owen said. “Helping them be physically healthy but also recognizing and meeting their emotional and spiritual needs is really needed.”