I’ve always wanted to be a nurse.
At Hodgson Vo-Tech High School, I followed the Nursing Tech track, and when I graduated in 2018, I was thrilled to be accepted into the Wesley College nursing program because I knew it was one of the best in Delaware. I also knew that I was going to attend a small college on a downtown campus, where I would know all my fellow students and my professors would all know me. That’s what Wesley College meant to us all.
The Wesley nursing program has been everything I expected. Every professor — full time or adjunct — supported all of us with love and compassion, instilled a firm belief that we could succeed and refused to accept anything less than our best. As I visited medical facilities around the state, I quickly discovered the high regard held for my mentors, whether I was at Bayhealth, ChristianaCare or elsewhere. “You’re getting great preparation at Wesley,” they told me. “Keep it up, and you’ll have no trouble finding a job when you graduate.”
I’m still “keeping it up.” I work full time for ChristianaCare while I finish my bachelor’s degree in nursing, with the ultimate career objective of becoming a trauma nurse practitioner someday.
But I won’t graduate from Wesley College because, this week, my college ceases to exist, and this fall, I will be continuing in nursing at the Wesley College of Health and Behavioral Sciences at Delaware State University.
It’s difficult for those of us who have been students at Wesley to believe this is all happening. We hadn’t seen it coming: 147-year-old traditions just don’t end that way, do they?
All of us committed to attending this college in part because of that small community and in part because of the great traditions associated with it. I will always treasure those cold Saturdays spent cheering for the football team, even if the Wolverine season got cut short by COVID-19. I will always consider myself exceptionally lucky for getting to spend those precious last three years with the Wesley nursing faculty.
I can’t hide the fact that this last year has been tough. Wesley was still Wesley, but in some important ways, it was different. There was a sadness on campus because we’d pass through the usual milestones of the year, and everybody would be thinking, “Wow, that’s the last time this will ever happen.” The faculty and staff never let us down, never stopped doing their jobs, never stopped pushing us, but we could all tell the closure was hanging over everything. I have so much respect for those people that I cannot properly express it, and my gratitude to them is endless. I’m pretty sure I speak for everyone in the student body when I say the final commencement ceremony was, all at the same time, one of Wesley’s proudest and saddest days.
I’m nervous about my senior year at Delaware State University. The people there have been welcoming, and the university has gone out of its way to make sure that students like me will be able to graduate on time. The nursing program there has the same accreditations and a good reputation up and down the state, and several of my former professors will be moving there, too.
Still, it’s a challenge to uproot myself from Wesley College, and I have to remind myself every day to keep my eyes on graduation, national exams and starting a career. I’ve been at this already through four years of high school and three years in college, and nothing is going to hold me back now.
That’s true of most of us, the Wesley College legacy students heading to Delaware State University this August. We’re nervous but determined, and we are conscious that the quality of a Wesley College education will be judged in part by how well we do in a new environment. We won’t let down the college that will always be our true, first alma mater.
We will all still be Wolverines for life.
N’dea Hardy is a 2018 Paul M. Hodgson Vocational Technical High School graduate, attended Wesley College from 2018-21 and will be a senior nursing major at Delaware State University this fall.
