Antanett Delorana Williams

I was a resident of Miami, and I was very familiar with FIU as part of our community. I graduated from a different school and became a nurse in 2017, but I went back for the bachelor's portion. After that, I eventually graduated in 2020. It was a different experience. Everything was 100% online, and we had just gone into the pandemic. I appreciated the professors for being understanding about how the pandemic affected us. We had clinicals, and a lot of us could not get clinical hours physically in the facility because of the pandemic. They provided us with a lot of alternatives. It was very lenient, and they didn't allow for the alternative routes to affect our grades. I was very successful, and I received my bachelor's degree, which I was very proud of. It was a smooth process. The only thing I did not get to have was my graduation. When they did have graduation, they reached out to us. I was not available to attend, but I appreciated that they offered us an opportunity to walk across the stage. There was one professor who allowed me to do my clinicals in her office. She let me do some projects with her, and I thought that was cool. The professors were very understanding, helpful, and each to reach out to. They made it enjoyable to learn the topics that they were teaching. Some of the things that we were doing were not nursing; they were other forms of education, like criminal justice. Some of our classes were unrelated to the medical field, but they provided us with a lot of information. They gave us different points of view about things that were going on in the world. The experience was well-rounded, and the staff was very good to us. I had one colleague named Natia, and we did a lot of chatting over the phone. We took some of the same classes at the same time, and I didn't feel alone. It was a feeling of relief when I got my bachelor's degree. It made me feel good.