The Anatomy of Learning
December 10th, 2025
Photo: Flynn Bridget
Writer: Eve Collon
Editor: Zoey Ueland
My days begin and end in my quaint, sunlit college house. Energy coats the walls, the air hums with gratitude, and I never feel alone. Before dawn, I exit this warmth to make the trek to Mott Children’s Hospital: a place where many people are living their worst nightmares. Their days begin and end in sterile, dimly lit rooms. Fear drifts through the halls, the air heavy with uncertainty and isolation. When my shift ends, and I walk out the front doors, I’m reminded that my patients dream of this exact moment. The difference between us is that I always come back, while they hope for the opposite.
This epiphany occurred to me one night as I was dragging my feet, dreading the 20-minute walk in 95-degree weather back to my house. As these negative thoughts came to fruition, my fortunes began to take their place, and my perspective quickly shifted. I don't have to walk home in the heat; I get to.
Entering nursing school, I understood that my coursework would be filled with classes such as pharmacology, biochemistry, pathophysiology, and so on. However, nobody could’ve prepared me for the weight of the implicit lessons that I would learn through every clinical shift that I entered. These lessons could never be explicitly taught.
More often than not, I enter a shift expecting to move easily through my usual routine, only to leave with a new, profound life lesson. Consistently being at the hospital has emphasized the lesson to take advantage of the unconventional classroom that is human interaction. Instead of rushing through your interactions with others, challenge yourself to absorb the available wealth of perspective. The most impactful lessons along my nursing journey have not come from my pharmacology or biochemistry lectures; rather, from understanding that sometimes, you are the best part of someone's worst days.
Your hardest feat could potentially be someone else's dream. So move forward with consideration of the two-year-old spending day 300 in her hospital bed, waiting for the call that she is receiving her long-awaited heart transplant. She would take any opportunity to switch places with you.
As my dad consistently reinforces, it’s important to keep your head on a swivel. While my reasons for believing this may differ from his, the message remains the same. Learning to truly take in your surroundings will teach you far more than any classroom ever could. I challenge you to try to learn something new with each experience and allow each one to shape your individual story. The only person who can undergo that luxury is you, the one who endured it.
