Workforce WAVE winner
Imaging growing up dreaming of becoming a nurse, but it seems impossible because your family has few resources to help you attain that dream. Well, this modest, unassuming student is making her dream come true. Christina Witherspoon, a petite Latino American, is very proud of her heritage. Her parents encouraged her to live for her dream even though neither of them even completed elementary school. Originally from Texas, Christina followed her sweetheart to Washington and has found herself in the center of a lot of attention.
Throughout the Nursing Program, she's kept a 3.9 GPA, worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant, held her family together and is the most recent recipient of the WAVE scholarship, Washington Award for Vocational Excellence, an extremely prestigious award. The selective award honors students for outstanding achievement in vocational/technical education. Each student is nominated by their school for their occupational proficiency, leadership, community activities, work experience, and other qualities. A committee, representing business, labor, education, the Legislature and citizens, makes the final selection.
But the charm of Chris is she maintains a very humble presence and feels blessed to have been given so many opportunities to excel. Christina is proud that she will be one of the few Hispanic students graduating in the Nursing Program. She is expecting to work in the community in hopes of giving back to those who have supported her. She wants to be an advocate for the many immigrants that work hard, but have very little money for health care. She is hoping her bilingual skills will add to helping those in need of nursing services.
Chris will be graduating in March of 2006. Christina says that the program at Pierce was exceptional. She can't say enough about how much she's learned, that the classes are tough, but her instructors are awesome. She never expected that college instructors would care so much and would want to see so many students succeed and not be intimidating. Christina says that having exceptional instructors and classes is the best part of her experience at Pierce.
