When asked what aspect of healthcare she’d like to specialize in, third-year nursing student Olivia Demag says maybe the ER, maybe labor and delivery. But she also quickly qualifies her answer. “In nursing, they constantly say ‘keep your mind open,’ because it’s fast-paced and a lot of things change.”
Olivia was born and raised in Wolcott and plans to work in Vermont after graduation. She says that an important part of developing that open mind has been immersing herself in new experiences beyond her familiar borders. Having been encouraged to “get out of her comfort zone,” and feeling an urge to spread her wings, Olivia chose to go to college out of state, even though that option was more expensive and required a lot of work to earn scholarships to cover the cost. She also jumped at the chance to work in Morocco for four months despite a traumatic first experience traveling overseas during the outbreak of COVID.
Katie Gesser, a VSAC outreach counselor at Lamoille Valley Union High School, speaks highly of Olivia, whom she met in 2021. “Olivia is an extremely hard-working and resilient student,” says Gesser. “She has never let any obstacles slow her down or keep her from achieving her goals. Olivia studied abroad last year to expand her view and understanding of the world. She is a highly motivated nursing student, and Vermont will be lucky to have her return to join our healthcare sector in the future.”
Olivia started thinking about a career in nursing around her junior year, when she started her first part-time job at a local nursing home. She thought that interest might dovetail well with her longtime interest in science. “I’ve always been very into science. It’s always changing, and you can never stop learning about it.”
High school was also when she first caught the travel bug, during that seminal but ill-timed trip to Italy. After raising funds for the weeklong trip, Olivia and several classmates completed most of their planned itinerary in March 2020, as news started to emerge about a new global pandemic. “At that point, we didn’t know much about this disease, so it was scary,” Olivia recalls. “On our last day, our chaperones woke us up at 3 AM and said, ‘we bought plane tickets, and we’re going home now.’”
Looking back, that first travel experience helped Olivia put her jitters in perspective as she packed for another highly anticipated trip last year: to study abroad for four months in Morocco. “I figured, it can’t be worse than the Italy trip!” she laughs.
The opportunity to study abroad was one of the reasons she chose to attend the University of New England, which is one of only a few nursing programs that allow its students to do international service-learning projects, says Olivia. During her time in Morocco, Olivia volunteered in the Tangier International Hospital, observed several laparoscopic and cardiac surgeries, and spent time in the ER. She also cared for newborns in the city orphanage.
Olivia made the most of her four months abroad. The group from UNE—which included 20 nursing students and 20 students from other departments—took several trips to different cities in Morocco, and Olivia and her friends paid for their own weekend trips to Amsterdam, Paris, London, Athens, Egypt and Spain. “We traveled every weekend. And on the planes, that’s where we studied,” she laughs.
The trip made such an impression on Olivia that she ended up getting a permanent souvenir: a tattoo that signified “perspective.” “Prior to traveling, and prior to going to college, I felt like I was so isolated and so used to seeing the same kinds of people. When I went abroad, I encountered so many different cultures and different ways of living and thinking. It changed my perspective entirely on the world and on life,” she says.
Olivia was recently elected to the board of UNE’s nursing student association, which organizes student volunteer activities like blood drives and packing meals for the homeless. Olivia and some of her classmates from the Morocco trip want to send care packages to the Tangier Hospital, as a way of saying shukran (“thank you” in Arabic) to those who supported their experience.
Olivia is also grateful to her parents and to VSAC’s Talent Search program, which supported different aspects of her ongoing college journey. Olivia’s parents, both of whom started college but didn’t finish, encouraged her and her younger sister Averie, now 15, to think about college. “They said they wanted us to go farther in our education than they had,” says Olivia, who adds that her mom and dad often put their own needs second to make sure she and her sister could take advantage of opportunities, particularly when it came to education. “They’ve been so helpful all along the way.”
VSAC’s Gesser helped Olivia fine-tune her plans for her future. “At the start of my junior year, when I met Katie, she told me, ‘It feels so far away, but two years is not much time.’ So, we explored my hobbies and my personality traits, and she gave me several quizzes about who I am as a person, why I like the things I like, and so on, and I realized that my love of science could connect to something deeper: my love for people. She set up a lot of resources to lead me down that path. And just building confidence: Katie really instilled a mentality of ‘you can do this.’ Without someone giving me that extra push, I don’t know if I would’ve done it.”
UNE’s out-of-state tuition was a financial reach for Olivia, who is financing her education on her own. Gesser helped her find scholarship and funding opportunities. Olivia proudly shares that those efforts have helped her cover 75% of her tuition. The program she promotes most loudly is the Vermont Forgivable Loan Program for nursing students, which erases one year of student loans for each year worked in Vermont after graduation. “I can’t preach it enough to people. It’s huge. And it’s made me work harder,” she says, because the program also requires students to maintain a solid grade point average. (Though Olivia needn’t worry; her grades have always been top-notch.)
Olivia says that when she first found out about the program, she was on the fence about whether she would return to Vermont after graduation, “mostly because I love to travel,” she says. “But I also value family and community a lot, and I think it’s important to give back to the area that served me for so many years. I’d say I was 50-50, but the forgivable loan program definitely solidified my plans to return.”
Olivia’s younger sister, Averie, is now starting to figure out her own future. “Right now she’s taking classes at the tech center and exploring career options. She’s not sure yet whether she wants to go to college, but I think that my going has been helpful, because she’s seen the opportunities that I’ve had at my fingertips. My advice to her, or others, is to explore every opportunity now while there’s not a lot weighing you down. There are a lot of different routes you can go, and none of them are bad. You might start on one path and find out that that’s not the one for you, and that’s fine. Just keep on working hard.”
This story is produced by Vermont Student Assistance Corp., created by the Vermont Legislature in 1965 as a public nonprofit agency, to advocate for Vermont students and their families to ensure that they achieve their education goals. Our vision is to create opportunities for all Vermont students, but particularly for those—of any age—who believe that the doors to higher education are closed to them. We begin by helping families save for education with Vermont’s state-sponsored 529 savings program. To help Vermonters plan and pay for college or career training, our counselors work with students in nearly every Vermont middle school and high school, and again as adults. Our grant and scholarship programs attract national recognition, and our loan programs and loan forgiveness programs are saving Vermont families thousands of dollars in interest. Visit vsac.org to learn more.
Read the story on VTDigger here: A nursing student goes far with the Vermont Nursing Forgivable Loan Program.