Nursing student working three jobs gets scholarship

Summer months are a full-on sprint for Camron Gosselin.

That’s when Gosselin, a nursing student, juggles three jobs. When he’s not caring for patients at a local hospital, he’s ringing up customers at Big Y supermarket or selling tickets at a local mini golf place.

His goal: to earn enough to pay for college tuition. He also works during the school year, scaling back to just his supermarket job, to cover his living expenses.

It came as a relief to him recently when he learned he had received the Margaret Sczesny ’69 ’79 Scholarship for Pediatric Nursing.

“The scholarship really meant a lot to me,” he says. “It made a big difference in being able to scale back my work during the school year. It allowed me to do more research on my own time to learn more about what I learned in class.”

When he graduates in May, Gosselin plans to become a pediatric oncology nurse. He explains that he has always had an interest in working with children. His mother is an elementary school teacher and he spent summers working as a camp counselor.

His grandmother, Ethel Matthews, who lived next door to him growing up in Old Saybrook, Conn., inspired him to become a nurse. A nurse at Hartford Hospital for more than 30 years, she would tell him stories about her days working the hospital floor.

Last year, when the pandemic shut down in-person classes at UConn, Gosselin returned home. He has remained there ever since, taking online classes and traveling to area hospitals to do his clinical coursework.

The pandemic made him more passionate about becoming a nurse.

“It really showed me how anyone can really need health care at any point in time,” he says. “I was taking care of people in their late teens and early 20s who had COVID and had to go to the hospital.”

Help lighten the load for nursing students like Camron by supporting a nursing scholarship.