EVERYBODY
has a dream, a desire, an ambition and a goal to achieve in one’s lifetime. As
the cliché goes: “The heart of the young is a room full of dreams worth
realizing.”
One such young dreamer was the 21-year-old
Angela Nicole Rago Ocio, a nursing graduate of Xavier University (XU)-Ateneo de
Cagayan Class 2011 and the 7th Placer of the recent licensure examinations for
nurses given last July this year.
Nicole, as she is commonly known to her
friends and teachers, admitted she had always dreamt of not just passing but
topping the licensure exams.
But, it was no easy dream to materialize not
even for the young and promising would-be nurse practitioner like Nicole.
Born from a well-heeled family of health
professionals and as the second sibling to a family of six, Nicole had always
been inclined for biological and medical sciences.
Although she had the heart for mathematics,
her college aptitude exam results were telling her something else -- to study
biology or any health-related courses.
After finishing high school at Corpus Christi
School, where she graduated with honors, Nicole decided to take up Nursing at
XU.
In college, Nicole claimed that she was
neither an intellectually exceptional student nor a marginal one.
“I was no more special than anybody else in
college. At times, I was on the dean’s list, at times I was not. I was really a
typical student in college wanting nothing more than to graduate,” she humbly
shares.
And just like any college student, Nicole also
had her share of shortcomings to hurdle.
“For me, the most difficult experience I had
in college was when I realized the nature of the nurses’ roles and the bitter
reality of how nurses have been dealing with the unemployment plague and unjust
working conditions,” she adds.
On top of everything, Nicole began to believe
that nursing is a service-oriented profession.
“Nursing is not a high and mighty profession;
you dwell into finding solutions to the health problems of the people, mostly
belonging to the low socioeconomic status and in the process, you learn to be
passionate in extending a caring hand to others,” she says.
Realizing that the heart of such a caring
profession like nursing is service, Nicole then on believed that the passion to
care can be learned and that the promise of pecuniary rewards was not a
priority.
“Indeed, the making of a nurse is not easy and
earning a bachelor’s degree in nursing was a learning-filled experience,” she
adds.
Upon graduating, Nicole entertained the
thoughts of pursuing a medical education. After mulling the possibilities, she
started to plan the path of her life in the coming years.
“Although I have decided to pursue studying
Medicine after earning my bachelor’s degree in nursing, it was yet and still is
an indefinite plan as I had to secure my finances and the most proximate thing
to do was hurdle the nurse licensure first,” she explains.
The nurse licensure examination (NLE) is a
biannual exam wherein the graduate nurse has the option to take either the July
or December exam.
At the spur of the moment, Nicole decided to
take the licensure exam scheduled in July.
“I was influenced by my cousin to take the
board exam in July immediately after graduation because December was too long a
waiting time,” she recalls.
It can be noted since it reopened its nursing
program that a large proportion of XU graduates opted to take the December
exams instead of July.
For July this year, the NLE was administered
by the Professional Regulations Commission (PRC) last July 2 to 3.
Nicole claims she started attending review
classes at Peak Review Center, where she earned herself a scholarship on April
4, which was also her birthday.
With only two months to prepare, Nicole, at
times had to excuse herself from the review to process her PRC application.
“I was struggling with the dwindling amount of
time for review as I was catching up with the application deadline set by PRC,”
she says. “With so many documents to comply yet so little time to prepare, I
told myself then that should I fail to fulfill all the requirements, I would
have to take the December exams instead.”
Just at the nick of time, according to Nicole,
she was able to successfully file her application on the last day of filing set
by the PRC.
In an interview with Marivic Yamut, review
director of Peak, she says Nicole had always been among her top performing
students in the review class.
“Nicole was always on the top five during test
drills and simulated exams,” she claims.
According to Yamut, her years of being a
review director have sharpened her skills in assessing the personalities of her
students. And based on her assessments, Nicole was not the typical studious
review student.
Moving along, almost two months after the NLE,
the results came. Nicole made it to top seven with a board rating of 86.40
percent.
“For the first time in my 10 years of
professional experiences as a review director, I was able to produce a
topnotcher in the July NLE,” Ms. Yamut proudly says.
According to sources, Nicole was also the
first July NLE topnotcher of XU since it produced its first graduates in 2006.
All of XU’s previous topnotchers took the December exams.
“To be honest, I was expecting that anybody
within the top five lists of my students based on the mock exams or pre-board
results to really make it to actual list of NLE topnotchers and Nicole was part
of the list,” Yamut says.
For her, the measure of a good teacher is best
gauged on the caliber of the graduates she produces, who are far better than she
is.
To date, Nicole is more than decided to pursue
a medical education, though she thinks she might be spending some time as a
nurse volunteer first to practice her nursing profession for the mean time.
Meanwhile, she advises her batch mates who are
yet to take the licensure this December: “Acknowledge that it is God who
provides everything we need to pass the board exam. Pray earnestly and believe
that He will grant you the desires of your heart.”
Congratulations Nicole.
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