North Park student Valeria Román, who will graduate with her Bachelor of Science in Nursing in December 2025, has spent ample time in hospitals, training to become a nurse.

In 2020, she partook in the Discovering Healthcare Careers internship at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, where she shadowed doctors and nurses. That internship opened the door for many other internships in which she participated through the Mentorship & Workforce Development at Lurie Children’s, including INSPIRE2 Student Nurse Mentoring Program, which connects nursing students from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds with mentors.

But that’s not where Román’s story at Lurie Children’s began.

The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Román chose nursing as a career when she saw how kindly her parents were treated by the staff at Lurie Children’s when she was there as a patient herself.

“What really caught my attention was the way every worker was kind and helpful to my parents, who are Hispanic and—at the time—didn’t speak much English,” she said.

Currently, Román works as a student nurse assistant at Lurie Children’s and plans to work in pediatric nursing, where she hopes to inspire other Hispanic kids to pursue a medical career.

“When children see doctors or nurses with their skin tone, it’s inspiring to them—it’s inspiring even to me now,” she said.

Read more.