Empowered Scholarship Winner: Ruby Green

Announcing Ruby Green as the $5,000 Empowered Scholarship Winner!

Nursing Careers Week is proud to celebrate nurses who are building meaningful careers with courage, purpose, and a commitment to what comes next. This year, we recognize Ruby Green as the recipient of the $5,000 Empowered Scholarship.  

The Empowered Scholarship recognizes a nurse whose story demonstrates resilience, purpose, and determination to create a meaningful future in nursing. For Ruby Green, that future has been shaped by an experience as a patient and mother that ultimately inspired a new career dedicated to providing others with compassionate, attentive care.

Turning a Painful Experience Into Purpose

Ruby Green's decision to become a nurse is deeply personal.

While eight months pregnant, Ruby Green sought medical attention after becoming concerned about the baby's movement. Despite repeated attempts to get help, Ruby Green ultimately experienced the devastating loss of a daughter.

That experience left Ruby Green with a conviction that would later help shape a nursing career: a patient's profession, background, or perceived status should never determine the quality of care that patient receives.

“I believe that in nursing, everyone should be treated as if they are a VIP,” Ruby Green wrote in the scholarship application.

For Ruby Green, becoming a nurse is one way of turning an extraordinarily difficult chapter into a commitment to ensure other patients feel seen, heard, and cared for.

A New Nurse with Big Goals

Ruby Green recently became an RN and is now focused on building a strong foundation for clinical practice.

In the Nursing Careers Week scholarship video, Ruby Green shared plans to pursue a nurse residency program and expressed an interest in working in the ER or ICU. Those ambitions build on two years of experience as a nurse in progressive care.

Ruby Green's educational goals go even further. The scholarship application identified advanced practice study and ambitions that include becoming a certified nurse-midwife and potentially a CRNA.

Underlying all of those goals is a simple commitment to continued growth.

“I believe in constantly evolving,” Ruby Green shared in the application. “I would like to learn as much as possible to go out into the workforce.”

Empowering What Comes Next

Ruby Green's journey is already a testament to persistence. Beginning nursing as a second career, completing nursing education, becoming an RN, and continuing to envision advanced practice have required an ongoing investment in the future.

As a parent, Ruby Green also sees those achievements as an opportunity to demonstrate to a daughter that ambitious goals are worth pursuing.

The Empowered Scholarship celebrates that momentum and the opportunity to keep moving forward with purpose.

Congratulations, Ruby Green!

Your determination to turn a deeply personal experience into more compassionate care for others is a powerful reminder of the difference nurses can make when they bring both knowledge and humanity to the bedside.

We are honored to celebrate your next step and excited to see where your nursing career takes you.