Nick Ngumo ’10 and his brother emigrated from Kenya to the United States in 1998 to join their mother, who’d arrived several years earlier. Ngumo entered Lancaster Mennonite High School in southeast Pennsylvania, graduating in 2000 with dreams of becoming an engineer. But his mother, a nurse herself, encouraged him to enter nursing.
In 2002, Ngumo was certified as an LPN and began working at The Mennonite Home, a retirement community in Lancaster. By 2008, he’d completed his RN degree and began working in intensive care at Lancaster Regional Medical Center. Like Anne Parson ’09, one of his colleagues and friends at Lancaster Regional, Ngumo had long been interested in a career as a nurse anesthetist – an advanced nursing degree requiring years of further study. First, he’d need a bachelor’s degree; the program at EMU’s Lancaster campus was attractive and convenient.
“EMU had a good reputation, so I went there,” said Ngumo. “[ADCP] was a very good preparation both for work and continuing education.”
This year, Ngumo entered the Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist program at Drexel University, a program that has very high admissions requirements, as indeed all CRNA programs do. One of his early research projects in that program, on the subject of ventilator-associated pneumonia, felt like a cinch after all the research and writing he’d had to do at EMU. After he completed the project, he wrote Priscilla Simmons, PhD, a professor and mentor of his at EMU, to thank her for the preparation.
If all goes according to plan, Ngumo will graduate as a nurse anesthetist in 2014. Further into the future, Ngumo – who married Leigh, a dietician at Lancaster General Hospital, in the spring of 2011 – has plans to return to Kenya to do health care.
* This translates as: Licensed practical nurse earns certification as a registered nurse from harrisburg area community college, then bachelor of science in nursing from eastern mennonite university’s adult degree completion program. next up is earning a degree as a certified registered nurse anesthetist.