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Vital Signs

An Exceptional Nursing Student Makes a Vow…and Makes History

When Janelle Sagmiller was growing up on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, she was troubled by the fact that so many of her friends were becoming pregnant as early as the sixth grade and dropping out of school. She vowed that when she was older, she would do something about this problem.

Today, Sagmiller, a senior-year BSN student at the University of Washington (UW) School of Nursing in Seattle, has not only made good on that vow, she has also become the first-ever Native American nursing student accepted into the prestigious national Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program.

Named after one of the astronauts who died in the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the federally funded McNair program awards grants to help outstanding undergraduate students from disadvantaged backgrounds earn PhD degrees leading to scholarly careers in teaching and research. The program targets students from populations that are underrepresented in graduate education, such as minority students from low-income families and first-generation college students. The grants are awarded directly to universities, which select their McNair Scholars, guide them through their undergraduate requirements, encourage their entrance into graduate programs and track their progress to successful completion of advanced degrees.

Out of her resolve to educate girls on the reservation about the importance of preventing pregnancy and staying in school, Sagmiller became attracted to nursing as a career. In her final year of high school, she worked with a lay midwife and nurse midwife for her senior project. “Seeing the relationship the midwives had with the patient really enticed me to follow their footsteps,” she says.

Pursuing her dream, Sagmiller enrolled in the BSN program at UW, where, in her freshman year, she founded the Teen Parent Mentorship Program. This project matched six teen mothers from Seattle high schools with UW nursing student mentors who assisted them with finishing high school and applying for college. Realizing her full potential as an inspiring role model for American Indian teens, in her junior year Sagmiller worked with two of her professors to develop culturally sensitive nurse recruitment materials for middle and high school students, which she presented at several Washington reservations.

Now, as a McNair scholar, this exceptional student nurse will be applying to the UW School of Nursing PhD program in 2003. Her goal, says Sagmiller, is to become a professor of nursing and “use my nursing skills and my own experience of what I find teen mothers lack to give back to my community.”

For more information about the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program, see www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/HEP/trio/mcnair.html.