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For many Rio Salado alumni, they found a new path forward in their lives thanks to the knowledge and skills they acquired at Rio. Rio Salado has been spotlighting some of our community members who’ve made great strides in their personal and professional lives in our Define Your Moment series— alumni like Alysa Call, who made a dramatic journey from teacher to nurse
“I started with Rio because I was actually a teacher at the time,” Call said. “And I needed to take a certain number of courses in order to keep up my teaching license.”
But while she enjoyed working with students, she soon was ready for a change.
“I realized that teaching 30 children all at once was too much for this introverted soul,” she said.
Call’s interest in healthcare prompted her to return to Rio to take pre-nursing school courses. Like the parable of the tortoise and the hare, Call took a patient, steady approach to her education, balancing the needs of raising a family and work with her learning.
“Rio Salado was perfect for me to be able to complete the courses, keep learning and growing, and maintain my teaching license while my kids were sleeping,” Call said. She praised the college’s flexibility for giving her the latitude to complete her program at her own pace.
“When I say flexibility, I mean not just in the sense of ‘hey, I can study and take tests even if I’m traveling,’” Call said. “It was the pacing. For example, in the summertime when my children were out of school I didn’t want to be taking too many rigorous courses. I could time everything because Rio has these frequent start dates. I could layer them in over time. So I was able to get a lot of courses done but with timing and pacing that exactly fit my life.”
Call used the Pomodoro Technique to manage her time; she credits her organizational skills with her success as an adult learner. For adults who are anxious about going back to school, Call has some sage words of hard-won wisdom to impart.
“Get your support system involved and become very, very efficient,” she said. “Unfortunately you do have to make sacrifices. So for example, my friends, you know, I told them, I love you dearly. I will not get to see you as often. So I made sure that I saw all of my friends right before I started each big step. If I knew I was gonna be very busy with prerequisite courses for the next coming year, year and a half, or right before starting nursing school, I made sure I saw all of my close friends. And then enacting systems and procedures in your life that make things automated.”
For Call, giving her kids the skills and confidence to be more self-supporting was an important part of her educational journey.
“I taught my children how to do their own laundry. There was a lot of preparation that went into that. And then I have a great partner that supported me and took on a lot…. The fears about taking care of my family, those I was able to work through by a lot of careful planning. I did a lot of preparation before I did this. I had a lot of food in the freezer.”
After finishing her prerequisites at Rio, Call enrolled in ASU’s Edson College of Nursing to finish her bachelor’s degree. Building on the foundation of the Spanish Medical Interpretation classes she took at Rio Salado, Call focused her studies on gaining a skill to work with a variety of patients.
When asked what she enjoys most about her work, Call talked about the comfort and security it offers people and how she’s been able to use her Spanish language skills to provide care for her patients.
“I’ve had people express gratitude that we can have that communication directly,” Call said. “You can see it on people’s faces that they’re so grateful to be understood. We all want to be understood and to have people see us.”
Getting to where she is now hasn’t been easy, but Call credits her slow and steady approach with keeping her on an even keel.
“Something that was really helpful for me was thinking about things one day at a time,” she said. “If you try to think about the whole journey- going to nursing school, the prerequisites, finding a job- I’d end up in the corner crying. You have to think about what the next best step is and focus on that one step.”
Call urges people not to be discouraged if they stumble while walking down the road of self-improvement.
“If you are having obstacles and difficulties, it's not a sign that you are not cut out for this,” she said. “It’s a sign that you’re doing a hard thing.”
Article by Austin Brietta