The Road to Becoming an RN: Student Spotlight on Jazmin Castenada

Jazmin, a first-generation college student, has dreams of becoming a Registered Nurse. Through her diligence, resilience, and consistent effort, her dream is becoming more and more of a reality every day.

As a high school student at Yerba Buena High School, Jazmin excelled academically, receiving acceptance at several UC’s during her Senior year. With options like UC Berkeley and UCLA in her grasp, Jazmin debated which school would provide the best path to a career in Nursing. She consulted her mentor who listened to her concerns and helped her parse through the competing priorities surrounding her college decision: Which school was best for pre-Nursing? Where would she have the greatest financial stability? Where would she live and how would she commute? After several discussions, Isabel, her mentor, recommended that she consider attending community college. While skeptical at first, Jazmin heeded her mentor’s advice, and enrolled in West Valley Community College for her freshman year.

Within her first semester, Jazmin realized that community college was the perfect place to begin her pursuit of higher education. Attending West Valley gave her the flexibility to support herself with a part-time job at Home Depot while balancing her classes. She believes the smaller class sizes and sense of community were paramount to her success when she had a difficult chemistry class during her second semester. There was a point where she had some health challenges and was concerned about her ability to take an important Chemistry exam. To her surprise, her chemistry professor was incredibly accommodating, even calling her mom to discuss the situation and the best way to support. Jazmin was given a couple extra days to take the exam, easing her worries. She became very close with this professor and believes that the level of investment and care she has experienced is unique to the community college environment.

As Jazmin continued her studies for pre-nursing at West Valley, she began searching for opportunities to gain clinical experience to complement her studies. One of her informal mentors shared a course to become a certified Medical Assistant which provided the necessary training needed to work in a clinical environment. For an entire semester Jazmin deftly balanced her classes, work and the Medical Assistant course, working tirelessly towards her goals. Once she obtained her certification, she was then able to land an internship assisting in general surgery at Kaiser San Leandro Medical Center. In addition to clinical experience, this opportunity helped expand her professional network, and further reinforced her goals of becoming a registered nurse.

Now, Jazmin is thrilled to continue working part-time as a Medical Assistant as she finishes her studies. With the exposure gained from her internship, she hopes to become a registered nurse specializing in wound care. In reflecting on her experience at West Valley, Jazmin shares: “For any prospective college student, consider community college for your first years of school... it has given me the flexibility to work… and gain valuable experience while continuing my studies.”