Eric Shaughnessy ’25 shared these remarks during the 2025 Nursing Pinning Ceremony.
Good evening, faculty, families, friends and my fellow graduates.
Tonight marks a profound milestone in our collective journey. As I look around at my classmates, I see more than just nursing students receiving their pins. I see experienced paramedics who have already saved countless lives, now expanding their capabilities as registered nurses.
Our path to this moment has been anything but traditional. While most nursing students worry about finding time to study between classes, we were balancing online coursework between 24-hour shifts. We submitted assignments from ambulance stations during brief moments of quiet. We studied after returning from calls that pushed us to our limits. We took exams after working overtime during holidays, disasters and mass casualty incidents.
Remember those nights? Logging into class portals at 3 a.m. after a grueling shift, fighting to keep our eyes open. Those moments when we questioned if adding “nursing school” to the already chaotic rhythm of EMS life was possible.
Yet, here we stand.
What makes our journey unique is not just the challenges we’ve overcome, but the exceptional foundation we bring to nursing. As paramedics, we’ve already mastered skills many nursing graduates won’t develop for years: making critical decisions with limited information, providing compassionate care on people’s worst days and developing clinical intuition that can’t be taught in any classroom.
As we transition to our roles as registered nurses, our futures hold remarkable possibilities:
Some of us will revolutionize emergency departments with our prehospital perspectives. Others will excel in critical care, with an instinctive ability to anticipate deterioration. Many will become clinical leaders, using our experience to guide healthcare teams. And some will pioneer new roles that bridge the gap between EMS and nursing.
None of us would be standing here today without our extraordinary support system:
To our spouses and partners, thank you for the countless solo parenting nights, for meals that went cold as we rushed to clinical and for loving us through exhaustion.
To our children, thank you for understanding when we missed important events and for inspiring us to create a better future.
To our parents, siblings and friends, thank you for covering childcare emergencies, sending encouraging texts and delivering coffee.
To our faculty, thank you for creating a program that respected our experience while challenging us to grow and for understanding when ambulance calls ran late.
And to our EMS colleagues, thank you for shift swaps and for supporting our evolution.
As we receive our pins tonight, remember that they symbolize not just our completion of nursing school, but the remarkable journey we took to get here. The patients of tomorrow deserve healers who understand healthcare from multiple perspectives.
Congratulations, Class of 2025. The ambulance bay doors have closed behind us, and the hospital doors are opening ahead. Let’s walk through them together and show the world what we can accomplish as registered nurses, leveraging our unique perspective and experience.
Thank you.
Eric Shaughnessy ’25 is a graduate of the PM to BSN program at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College. He is part of the first cohort to graduate from this program. He also previously served as an assistant professor and the director of the paramedic sciences program at SMWC. In his free time, Eric loves to travel and spend time with his family.
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