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Kimberly Porter (BSN, 2012; MSN/NED, 2014) was already working full time as a medical assistant when she decided to return to school for nursing. About the same time, she got the chance to become a teacher herself: She was offered a job as a CPR instructor. So, as a full-time student, full-time instructor and part-time medical assistant, Porter earned her Associate Degree in Nursing.

After 15 years of work experience, however, Porter heard the siren song of school once again. In her experience, hospitals were raising the bar for their nurses, preferring to hire those with bachelor’s degrees. 

She went back to school to earn her online RN to BSN degree from ���۴�ý, followed by her Master of Science in Nursing. In doing so, she learned that she not only had a passion for learning but also for education and teaching, which would offer her even more opportunities and security — as well as a place at the head of the class.

Porter developed her passion for medicine when she was a child visiting her grandmother in the hospital where she received treatment for diabetes. Hospitals can be scary for a little kid. But when Porter visited, she found a place of care and community.

“It’s deep in my psyche that my grandmother had a good experience there,” recalls Porter, who also has fond memories of the peaceful and reassuring space the hospital offered her and her sister during their visits.

When Porter saw the hard work that nurses put in — both to treat her grandmother and to foster an environment of healing for visitors — she knew that offering the same level of care would be her calling. “Every time I cared for my patients, that would be in my head: I’m caring for them as if they were my relative, how I would want my relatives to be cared for,” she says.

Her dedication informed her approach to patient care and care for friends and family. More than one colleague attests to Porter's commitment to supporting them both on and off the floor. And Porter supported her family even while working as a nurse and attending school. The flexible course offerings at ���۴�ý made it more feasible to do it all.

They, in turn, supported her. Her children gave her the space she needed to study, and her husband reviewed her papers and gave her quizzes.

Earning her bachelor’s degree helped Porter compete for nursing jobs, but her time in school awoke another passion: teaching.

“I wanted to get my degree not only to stay competitive. It was to explore teaching opportunities too,” Porter says, noting that her concentration in nursing education prepared her to shift from being an emergency department nurse to being a clinical educator at the hospital where she worked.

It was there that she helped launch an accredited RN residency program while also serving as an adjunct nursing instructor. The latter is a role she continues to fulfill to this day, even as she climbed the ladder to become a director of education.

Everything Porter worked so hard to do and be comes together in her director role. She helps nurses continue their professional development just as she did. It’s been challenging for sure (“Nursing school can be a bit traumatizing,” she says with a smile), but it’s also been profoundly fulfilling. “Sharing the knowledge … with people who want that knowledge,” she says, is what drives both her daily work and her long-term career. “It’s super-rewarding,” she says.

Porter has earned a career she loves and a lot of cheerleaders as well. This includes her colleague Meredith Temple at CommonSpirit, Dignity Health - Community Hospital of San Bernardino.

“Kim has the ability to connect with and bring out the best in all those she works with,” says Temple, recalling the project on which the two first met: rolling out an education program for the hospital’s entire 1,600-person staff.

“This was the first time I was tasked with rolling out a project of this magnitude,” says Temple, “but with Kim by my side, we successfully captured all staff. I truly believe that if she was not part of the team, we may not have reached our goal of 100%.”

Temple adds: “Not everyone can be a mentor, leader, boss and friend, but that is who Kimberly Porter is.”

While Porter was fortunate to build a fulfilling career, enjoy job security and receive support from friends and family, none of that was her primary motivator to keep learning, to keep striving.

“I did it to prove to myself that I could do it, internally, because that was the pride I wanted: to be able to accomplish this degree in nursing, to be an expert in the field,” Porter says. She saw education as an investment in herself and as a way to honor the fields of nursing and education, in which she had found so much fulfillment.

Maybe that’s why, when reflecting on what she has found most rewarding from her experience and schoolwork, Porter points to something that happened not at work but at home in the months after her graduation. “My daughter was 17 or 18, and she had just gotten a bank account — and she actually put the picture of me in my master’s degree [graduation] garb, with her and her little sister, on her new debit card.”

For Porter, there was no greater sign that her work had paid off than seeing her daughter take such pride in her.

“Something like a licensure can be taken away,” Porter says. “A certificate can expire. But your education is never taken away.”

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