Chapter 01: Inspired to Enter Nursing: An Altruistic and Intellectual Profession
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Description
Dr. Summers talks about her family and her mother’s influence as a role model. She sketches her educational background and her path to her first job in nursing.
Dr. Summers explains that nursing attracted her because it is an interactive profession where the nurse positively influences the experience of another human being. She also underscores that nursing is intellectually rigorous and demands critical thinking skills and the ability to pull together data.
She next traces her path to college (George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, BSN, 1978). She talks about working as a nurse throughout her program and the mentoring she received from the nurses at her job.
Identifier
SummersB_01_20140123_C01
Publication Date
1-23-2014
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Barbara Summers, PhD, Oral History Interview, January 23, 2014
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Educational PathPersonal Background Professional Path Influences from People and Life Experiences Mentoring Inspirations to Practice Science/Medicine Definitions, Explanations, Translations On Care The Clinician Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
All right. So we are recording again, and I’ll just put the identifier on. So I’m Tacey Ann Rosolowski interviewing Dr. Barbara Summers for the Making Cancer History Voices Oral History Project run by the Historical Resources Center at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Dr. Summers joined MD Anderson in 1997 as clinical administrative director for the Hematology Clinical Program. She is currently vice president of Nursing Practice, chief nursing officer, and head of the Division of Nursing. She also serves as a professor and chair of the Department of Nursing. This interview is taking place in Dr. Summers’ office in Pickens Tower on the main campus of MD Anderson. This is the first of two planned interview sessions, and today is January 23, 2014. The time is 1:19. Thank you, Dr. Summers, for agreeing to participate in the project.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I wanted to just start with some background questions, if you could just tell me where you were born and when, and tell me a bit about your family.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Well, I was born in Aurora, Illinois, which is right outside of Chicago, and I was very young when my father was transferred to New York and we moved to a home in a suburb outside of New York City. My mother was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, and my father met my mother while he was in Chicago working. So that’s how I came to be.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What’s your birth date?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
March 4th, 1951.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Thank you.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
I am one of six children, and when my family moved to New York, I believe that my mother was pregnant with my first sister. So we were, interestingly, ordered three girls followed by three boys in our family.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, are you the oldest?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
I’m the oldest of the six children. So we initially moved into a beautiful home in a suburb of New York City, it was called West Nyack, and the home was built before the Revolutionary War. So we lived there for a couple of years, and my parents then purchased a home in one of the new suburbs. I lived in that home with my, by then, two sisters and then subsequently two other brothers until I was approximately nine years old, at which point in time I moved to Richmond, Virginia, with my family. My father was employed in the pharmaceutical industry, and his work took him to Richmond, Virginia.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Did your mom have a profession?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
She was a nurse before she got married and started having six children, and then she was a full-time homemaker, and a woman of tremendous intellect, still one of the smartest people that I have ever known, and smarter than I am, actually.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And what shape did her intelligence take? There are so many different kinds.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Mm-hmm. I think she just had tremendous critical-thinking abilities, but she read voraciously. She had a fabulous command of the English language. She had a tremendous vocabulary. She was capable of and truly enjoyed having conversations about politics and economics, and she loved nothing more than having my husband and I come to visit them, and my husband would, in a purposeful way, engage her in a conversation taking a devil’s advocate position, because the two of them enjoyed the back-and-forth so much, and she adored it too. So she was just a really, really bright woman, and I believe that she had other wonderful attributes. She was beautiful and she was very loving, but I think her intellectual capabilities were as attractive, in my father’s eyes, as every other aspect of her.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It sounds like she inspired you. I mean, you sound like you really admire your mother.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
I do. She passed away in 1997. I have a great deal of admiration for my mom. And I remember as I was an adult, I one day asked her, I said, “Mom, how in the world did you ever manage six children, bringing up six children?” And she just paused and looked at me and said, “I had no choice. I had to figure out how I was going to do it. You were here, all six of you were here, so we had to get that figured out.” Yes, I admired her tremendously, and I think she has been a role model for me in terms of mental toughness, I think, you know, understanding that things are not always going to be easy, but if you really apply yourself and your gifts, then you can get through just about anything.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, I read that somewhere you were quoted as saying you come from a family of nurses.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Mm-hmm.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Who else in your family was a nurse, and when did you realize that you wanted to become a nurse yourself?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Well, Mom was a nurse, and then as I was in high school and thinking about my career options, I became interested in nursing and originally had applied for and been accepted to a three-year diploma-in-nursing program, and I was all set to pursue that and then I started talking to my classmates. And, you know, the allure of going away to college became overwhelming for me, so I decided that I would follow the crowd like a lemming, and took a little detour from my nursing aspirations and applied to a women’s college in Virginia and was accepted there and was enrolled in a secondary-education track to become a high school teacher in biologic sciences.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And this college was?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Longwood College in, believe it or not, Farmville, Virginia, and it was very much like farmville. There were lots of tractors there. But it was a college town. There was a women’s college and there was a men’s college in the same town, so, you know, there was the usual college carryings-on. So I persisted in that education pathway until I got to my junior year and became exposed to the practice teaching and what the reality of teaching a group of high school students would be, and I realized I could not envision myself spending the rest of my life doing that. So I left college at Longwood and I moved back home and I enrolled in a community college in a nursing program to obtain—at that time it was going to be an associate degree in nursing. And I immediately felt that I had made the right decision.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What was it that had made you think about nursing in the first place when you were in high school?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
You know, I think it’s the opportunity to, number one, be in a very interactive profession where I had the opportunity to positively influence the life experience of another human being, and that has been a theme throughout my career, regardless of the type of position that I’ve held. So there was that deep calling to be able to assist and support and help others. The other thing that appealed to me was the fact that nursing is intellectually very rigorous. You know, yes, it includes compassion, although there are certainly nurses somewhere, I’m sure, who are not compassionate. But nursing is about far more than just compassion. I mean, nurses have to have extraordinary critical-thinking skills and to be able to pull together many, many data points of diverse information to create a whole that is reflective of the experience of the client or the patient. So I was just stimulated by that. Nursing also uniquely combines the physical sciences and the social sciences. So it just had a lot of attractiveness to me on an altruistic basis but also on an intellectual basis.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Were there any discussions that you had with your mother, for example, about nursing? I’m just wondering if her experience influenced you in any way, either the challenges or the things that had inspired her?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Not really. In fact, now that you mention it, I don’t think I ever really spent a lot of time talking to Mom about her nursing practice. I’m sure the fact that I had such admiration for her and the fact that she had practiced in nursing had an influence on my interest, but I didn’t really talk with her about that. I wish I had. I wish I’d had the opportunity, now that I reflect on that, to do so. So anyway, I was in that associate degree program, and I maintained full-time employment and went to school, and because I’d already accumulated so many credit hours in a baccalaureate program, I was able to do some tutoring with nursing students. I tutored them, actually, in writing, writing English composition, which was a lot of fun. And then my father was transferred again, this time to the Washington, D.C. area, to northern Virginia. I had not finished my nursing program so—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What year was this?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Oh, golly. This was in 1975. I hadn’t finished my nursing program, and so I moved with Mom and Dad. On one of his trips up to the northern Virginia area, he had stopped by the local community college to get information about the nursing program, and when he talked to the dean of the community college about me, she said, “Well, she can’t come to school here. Because she’s so close to getting her baccalaureate degree, she has to enroll in George Mason University and get her BSN,” which was wonderful advice then, and I’m very appreciative of that woman having said that to my dad. So we moved up there—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I’m not sure why you say that. What did George Mason give you that you wouldn’t have had at the community college?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
I graduated with a BSN instead of an ADN.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
And you know, the dean talked to my dad about what my experience had been, and I’d finished three years of a baccalaureate program in the biologic sciences, so I’d had my chemistry and my physics and my biology and my anatomy and my physiology. So when I transferred to George Mason University, those credits were all accepted, so I had also had my initial fundamental nursing coursework. So I was able to come in and finish my baccalaureate degree in two years, my BSN in nursing.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Which you received in 1978.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Mm-hmm.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
And the coursework that I had to focus on, really, was the nursing core coursework, because I had taken all of the other prerequisites, with the exception of a speech communication class, which was required. And that was just an example of synchronicity—it wasn’t a coincidence—because that’s where I met my husband, because he was a theater major and that was also a requirement for his degree.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
His name is?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
George. His name is George. So George and I met in our required speech communication course. So I graduated in 1978. And I had worked, while I was in my nursing program at George Mason University, I had worked at a local hospital in the community as a clerk, and I worked evening shift and I had the opportunity to work with a wonderful group of nurses who were mentors to me, and I’ve had very few mentors in my career, but those nurses were mentors to me.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And what did that look like? What did they give you?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Well, you know, we would have a conversation and they would say, “What are you learning in nursing this week?” And I’d talk about what was going on in the coursework or I’d talk to them about when I would have my clinical experiences taking care of patients and, you know, issues that I would encounter or situations I didn’t understand. And we would just talk about it, and they would say, “Well, that’s what I would do,” or, “I’d recommend this.” Or, as in the course of taking care of patients, they might say, “Why don’t you come in with me and help me with this patient, because I’m going to be doing a particular thing, and it will be really important for you to have seen that before, because you probably won’t have that experience in school.” And when it came to starting IVs, they wanted to be sure that I was good at starting IVs before I graduated, so they made me practice on them, how to start an IV. So the mentoring took all sorts of shapes. It was also very helpful for me because I interacted not only with the nurses but with physicians, and I developed a level of comfort and confidence in communication with physicians that was very useful to me when I graduated from my nursing program, because when you’re a student, you don’t have those kinds of opportunities to really appreciate interprofessional practice and to feel comfortable with communicating with other members of the healthcare team. So, worked there, graduated, took a position in a community hospital specifically because that hospital had primary nursing as its nursing care delivery model.
Recommended Citation
Summers, Barbara and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 01: Inspired to Enter Nursing: An Altruistic and Intellectual Profession" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1238.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1238
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