This month, St. Peter’s Hospital College of Nursing awarded recipient Joseph Kranick a very special scholarship to continue his degree in nursing. This scholarship opportunity was created after the passing of beloved RN, Greg Mulson, who passed suddenly on October 14, 2020, from cardiac arrest at only 30 years old. Greg was an alumnus of Memorial School of Nursing, which is now St. Peter’s Hospital College of Nursing, where he completed his degree and began his journey in healthcare soon after. Being that 2020 was the Year of the Nurse, Stat Staff Professionals implemented a scholarship to carry on Greg’s legacy in his name for students pursuing a career in the nursing field. The essay Joseph constructed beautifully outlined his passion for the healthcare community and can be read at length below.

My name is Joseph Elygiusz Kranick. I will be entering Nursing IV and Behavioral Health next semester and I am applying for the Michael Gregory Mulson Scholarship. The terms ‘compassion, empathy, and kindness’ are qualities that everyone in the health field should possess. A scholarship honoring Greg having these qualities as a requirement is lovely, as he was one who demonstrated them daily in his own career as a Registered Nurse. I was fortunate enough to work with Greg when I moved back to Albany and started a job in the Emergency Department at Albany Medical Center. Greg was a traveling RN at the time and seeing the time he took with each individual patient, even in the busy madness of a level 1 trauma center, is the quality nursing care I will strive to give.

In my current job, as an Emergency Room Technician, I feel as though I display compassion, empathy, and kindness. One of the most important things I learned early in my career to remember is, patients are real people. The medical field is like no other. A computer technician working on a hard drive is trying to fix an inanimate object. If they cannot fix it, it is replaceable. In the medical field we cannot replace the people we are working with. There is real emotion involved. We sometimes see people on the worst days of their lives. I learned that a simple conversation with them, an actual human interaction, can go a long way. Doing so may have a positive effect on their stay in the hospital, rather than just going into the room to do the task at hand and leaving. I do my best to empathize with patients. I cannot always directly relate, because I may not have experienced firsthand what brought them in. But I can stay and talk with them about it; let them know we will assist in figuring out their care, that it may be rough now, but we can work this out together. It may seem like a simple thing but too often in the emergency room things move fast. I am very compassionate about this quality of care. Every second in an emergency situation matters, and not only for traumas and the critically ill, but for mental health as well. If I have the extra few seconds to listen to my patients, I will give them everyone.

I wanted to become a nurse for a few different reasons. The first being because during my first undergraduate degree, I became an EMT-Basic. I quickly fell in love with the medical field; finding a passion for work that I found in no other job I have had before. After graduating, I took a few years off, worked in a couple different hospitals, trying to figure out where in the medical field I wanted to have my career land. Observing the way nurses were able to care for their patients, always being at the bedside with them, caring for them hands-on, is where I know I belonged. Secondly, when I was a kid, I had a dream of being a superhero like Spiderman. Working hard every day to save the world. I quickly learned that was never going to happen. I did, however, find that in the medical field I can change an individual’s world. I could put a smile on a patient’s face while wrapping their sutured laceration, performing successful CPR on a trauma patient, or helping a family cope with the loss of a loved one. True life superheroes are found in scrubs, not in movies or comic books. That is my dream: to be one of those superheroes.

Thank you in advance for taking the time and consideration with my application for this scholarship.

Stat Staff Professionals is proud to partner with St. Peter’s Hospital College of Nursing in caring for the future of healthcare and higher education, together.