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When Emily Slaughter was in high school, one summer her mom said, “You shouldn’t go swimming every day. Why don’t you go get some meaningful experience?” So Emily began volunteering at a Fort Worth hospital. “I was basically a candy striper but in a really critical care unit. The nurses knew I was interested in medicine and took me under their wing and said, ‘Why don’t you come and see what we do?’” From then on, nursing was her calling. She knew UT’s School of Nursing had a great reputation, and on a whim, applied for the full-ride Forty Acres Scholarship. Finalists for the scholarship are brought to campus for a weekend. “By the end of that weekend, I was like, ‘I don’t care if I get the scholarship; I have fallen in love with this school,’” she remembers. “This is a first-class school. This is a first-class institution. I’m coming no matter what!” She already has accepted a job offer from Ascension Seton in Austin, but graduate school and certification as a nurse practitioner are likely in her future. The School of Nursing empowered her to advocate for change in the profession. In one course, each student picked a legislative bill to advocate for and testified at the Capitol. (She testified in favor of a bill that would help opioid addicts get treatment in prison.) “For a lot of students in my graduating class, getting to the finish line seems like an accomplishment that was never going to happen. With COVID changing learning from in person to online to hybrid, being here on campus and graduating is an awesome feeling.” Read more about Emily and meet other graduates at news.utexas.edu/class-of-2022 #UTGrad22