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On the HigherEdJobs podcast, co-host Andy Hibel talked with Greg White, an associate professor at The College of St. Scholastica. White is the director of the Traditional Undergraduate Nursing Program and the faculty lead for the Veteran to Bachelor of Science in Nursing program. Their conversation is captured in a two-part podcast series.
White enlisted in the Air National Guard in 2007 and has been deployed on missions worldwide, working as a medic. He oversaw COVID testing and coordinated findings with the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis in the spring of 2020.
In this conversation, White describes his career path and why he chose nursing and academia. He also discusses his recent experience as a subject matter expert collaborating with Norwegian counterparts to train Ukrainian soldiers to be medics in the current war against Russia.
White said that participating in the mission is likely the most important thing he has ever done in his career.
Taking Every Left Turn Brought Him to Nursing
At 21, White went to school to be a firefighter. As part of the training, he took an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) course, and something clicked.
“Medicine is something that I liked, and working with patients is something I really enjoyed,” he said. He started working as an EMT and joined the Air Force, collaborating on teams with nurses. That’s when nursing as a career got on his radar.
“I tell nursing students when I work with them now that it’s okay to not know what you want to do,” he said. “I took every left turn to get where I’m at,” White added. “I had the ability or the good fortune to just be in a situation where I found something I loved.”
White said he ended up in academia almost by accident. He had been teaching EMTs for the Air National Guard and recognized his passion for it. He was working night shifts at a hospital while pursuing a master’s degree and helping coach a rugby team at the College of St. Scholastica.
“After a night shift and a morning practice, I was tired and thinking about how I really do enjoy teaching,” White explained. He went to the central office on campus and asked if they had any adjunct opportunities.
“It turned out for the last year they had been trying to recruit faculty to teach in their Veteran to BSN nursing program,” he said. White ended up with a full-time job offer.
He takes pride in supporting students and encouraging them during their educational journeys. And he still recalls being scolded for asking questions and being told he was not “acting enough like a nursing student” while training to be a flight medic.
Being treated dismissively by an instructor was eye-opening and a tough experience at the time.
“When I was given the opportunity to build a program here at St. Scholastica, I just thought of that moment and that I could potentially be the guy that makes sure nobody here ever had that experience,” White said.
A Life-Changing Project to Train Ukrainian Soldiers
In the second part of the interview, White described in more detail the recent work he’d completed to train Ukrainian combat soldiers.
He said that during this training project, he and others on the team had many difficult conversations as they tried to understand what these Ukrainian soldiers were facing.
“It is something that, honestly, we haven’t seen since World War One,” he said. “So, especially with these students, if you can foster that light of curiosity or you can answer their questions, those are the students that you know are going to try to put in that work to be better and save more lives.”
White said these soldiers would not have a grace period or soft landing when they returned to their country.
“These soldiers are going to be expected to go right back to war with really no break,” he explained. “That was evident in how they were behaving in class, how they were invested, how they were working hard. Their job is to go back home and save a lot of lives.”
Hibel asked White to elaborate on why this felt like the most influential experience of his life.
“I love taking the knowledge that I have and experiences that I have and putting it into education to get that point across, and make it more interesting, and get students excited about where they are,” he said.
White said it was incredibly rewarding to see that “lightbulb” moment for these soldiers and to know that they’d be putting into practice what they’d learned as medics.
He looks forward to sharing stories about the experience with his students at The College of St. Scholastica.
White said he plans to show students the difference they can make in the world and encourage them to apply what they learn professionally as nursing students.
“If I can convey some urgency in the fact that we need teachers and convince even one or two of these students to go forward and to look at dedicating their time and efforts to building something better, that’s going to be a win for me,” he said.
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Listen to Part 2, episode 64.
