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Westfield State alum Yirancis Rivera is crafting her career as a nurse after graduation, and she recently shared her story with BusinessWest.com, a business journal from Western Massachusetts. Rivera, who came to Massachusetts from Puerto Rico at the age of 7, learned much of her English from television shows—a common experience for first-time language learners. However, Rivera was translating at a different level than most; she often helped translate for her mother during doctor's appointments. In the article written by George O'Brien, she shares some of the anxiety in translating into a newer language, and having to deal with complex medical terms, touching on the pressures of making sure the translation is conveying the right words. 

Rivera, however, persevered through every aspect, including the nursing program at Westfield State, crediting smaller class sizes and the excellent professors who make up the department, walking alongside her, helping her every step of the way. Now, Rivera is working with a proctor at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton; however, she will be transitioning next month into the med-surge unit, a unit responsible for a wide variety of patients, from those recovering post-op to those with illnesses that require active monitoring and treatment. Rivera also shared a goal of one day working in the intensive care unit, citing both the ability to help patients cope while also developing her critical thinking skills, in quite a unique way.  

But Rivera also shared a quite impactful reason for why she wanted to be a nurse, more than helping as a translator early on, "I knew that I wanted to be someone my patients could look up to in the sense that they speak the same language as me...But I also saw that there weren't many nurses who looked like me, and I wanted to be part of that change, she told BusinessWest."  

To read more about Yirancis, click the link here.