About the School

Nursing Student Awarded McNair Presidential Scholarship
FROM: Kathleen Dannenhold
206-221-2456
kathyd@u.washington.edu
DATE: January 16, 2002

Janelle Sagmiller, a UW nursing senior, is the recipient of the prestigious Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program Award for 2003. She is the first Native American nursing student to be accepted into the McNair program, which supports the academic and professional development of undergraduates who plan to teach and conduct research at the college level.

Sagmiller's interest in teaching evolved from her experiences growing up on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, where several friends became pregnant as early as sixth grade and dropped out of school. She vowed to do something about this, noting that role models were often missing from the reservation, and eventually became attracted to nursing because of its emphasis on the whole patient - physical, emotional and spiritual. Although young women on the reservation needed information about health care, she says, they also needed help making good decisions about their futures.

Her resolve was increased during her senior year in high school, when Sagmiller worked with a lay midwife and nurse midwife for her senior project. "Seeing the relationship the midwife had with the patient really enticed me to follow their footsteps," she explains, adding that she admires midwives as "strong women, who have a clear sense of what they are doing."

As a freshman at the UW, Sagmiller founded the Teen Parent Mentorship Program, which matched six teen mothers in Seattle high schools with undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral nursing students. The students provided support for the teen mothers, helping them with school assignments and assisting them with college applications and financial aid forms. During her junior year, under the tutelage of Dr. Kristen Swanson, chair of Family and Child Nursing, and also June Strickland, a Native American professor of nursing, Sagmiller developed culturally-sensitive nurse recruitment materials targeting middle and high school students, which she presented at several Washington reservations. She was also one of five students selected by the Office of Minority Affairs to visit Japan as part of an American Ethnic Studies class.

As a McNair Scholar, Sagmiller says she plans to "use my nursing skills and my own experience of what I find teen mothers lack to give back to my community." She will be applying to the UW School of Nursing PhD program this winter. The McNair Award supports low income or first-generation college students who are from groups underrepresented in doctoral programs. Named after a scientist who perished in the Challenger disaster, the award is funded by the U.S. Department of Education in conjunction with the University of Washington, its graduate school and the UW Office of Minority Affairs.

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