A meeting at a U.S. Navy reunion with a fellow submarine mechanic nearly a decade ago convinced a 48-year old grandfather named Forrest Gross to pursue a career in medicine.
Thursday Gross completes a long second career voyage when he graduates from Gateway Community College as a fully qualified and certified nurse.
Gross is like many of the 600 Gateway graduates who will receive their degrees in ceremonies at 6 p.m.Thursday at Yale’s Woolsey Hall. Many are adults with jobs, kids, and lots of responsibilities; their second careers and life changes required the support of family, teachers, and wise counselors.
After eight years on submarines and while in his 20th year as a wastewater technician for Groton Utilities, Gross was inspired by his buddy at the reunion.
“Like me, he had been a mechanic, but then he became a psychologist,” Gross said. “Then a psychiatrist. I decided I’d take steps too and become a doctor.”
He enrolled at Three Rivers Community College in Norwich, Gross said in a interview , “but my biology teacher one day advised me that at the rate I was able to take courses, while working, that I’d be an intern in my 60s.”
So he switched to nursing. Gross discovered that the only way he and his wife could manage their family and his nascent studies was to find a school where nursing courses were taught in the evening. That would be New Haven’s Gateway .
He enrolled in 2006, traveling several times a week nightly, about 140 miles, he estimated, for each round-trip commute. Having worked all day, it wasn’t easy on the driving, or the studying.
“I had always been an A student in high school,” he said, “but some of the pre-reqs and the nursing courses were tough. I was tired. With eight hours working every day, lectures of two to four hours twice in the evening, and 12 hours of clinical work weekly, I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t have time to study, and I was even pulled over, at least once, for nearly falling asleep while driving.”
The result: “After the second semester I failed out.”
He still wanted to make it work. Enter the collaboration of a supportive wife and the director of Gateway’s nursing program director, Sheila Salerna.
“I met with Sheila,” Gross said, “and she helped me work out how I could finish the pre-reqs and devote more time to the curriculum. But that meant that I’d have to go to school full-time.”
Gross talked to his wife, who manages a jewelry story in Waterford. “We made a deal,” he said. “I’d quit my job, and then, when I became a nurse, she’d retire.”
In short order, Gross left his Groton Utilities position, cashed in his pension, and applied for and was accepted back into the nursing program at Gateway.
Of the 62 nursing graduates this year, nine are male. According to Alison Skratt, a spokesperson for Gateway, approximately 16 percent of the college’s nursing graduates annually are male. Also, she added, this spring 40 percent of the credit students enrolled at the school are, like Forrest Gross, over 40 years old.
Gross said he told a bit of his journey to his colleagues at the future nurses’ pinning ceremony earlier this week. The speaker at Thursday morning’s commencement ceremonies is scheduled to be Ted Kennedy, Jr., who lost a leg to cancer at age 12 and has become an advocate for the disabled.
That is likely to be particularly meaningful to Forrest Gross. He and his wife are planning to move to Memphis, where his wife will retired and the new RN hopes to get a job at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in pediatric oncology.
“I’ve always loved kids,” he said. “Cancer is so devastating and it affects everyone in some way, and I just want to be party to helping.”