Meet Trisha Kilgore.

Trisha is a nursing student at Ivy Tech Community College Northeast. She’s caring, headstrong, and a lover of vampire shows and “The Walking Dead.”

Ivy Tech has been pretty important to Trisha’s family throughout her life. Twenty-two years ago, Trisha’s mother  graduated from the college’s licensed practical nursing program. Her sister graduated from the registered nursing program seven years ago, as did her husband in 2011.

When Trisha graduates — in August, she hopes — she and her husband plan to work in Fort Wayne for about a year before becoming traveling nurses. Their five children — he has two, she has three — are grown and out of the house, so the time will allow them to use their degrees and to travel.

“You take 12-, 13-week assignments in different areas around the country,” she says. “The recruiter we talked to said there’s hundreds of different cities she could place us in.”

Trisha’s the kind of student we want to celebrate on Green Light, Ivy Tech Northeast’s new blog. We want to share students’ stories and the stories that come out of some of our awesome classes. (Like nursing. Just look at the toys — ahem, serious medical equipment — Trisha gets to play with.)

This fellow wears a wristband that IDs him as Bronson, Kenneth. Teachers can make him talk to nursing students as they diagnose his maladies.

School of Nursing Dean Jewel Diller says these are IV start hands — students can practice insterting IVs with them.

These arms had the skin stripped off so they could be cleaned. Those grooves allow students to practice inserting an IV.

We’ll be posting stories on Fridays to make you smile, to make you think, or just to give you a happy little boost before the weekend. (Or, you know, to creep you out by showing you fake skinless arms.)

Don’t want to miss a post? Check out that grey box in the upper right hand corner of this page where you can sign up to receive Green Light posts straight in your inbox.

If you know of any students or Ivy Tech Northeast stories that deserve a post like Trisha’s, I’d love to hear about it. Leave a comment on this post with a way to get in touch with you, or you can email me at jgarver2@ivytech.edu.

Thanks for stopping by!