Euclid Operating Room Nurse Balances Career, Family and Degree

In the midst of the pandemic, Sarah Talarico is balancing a demanding nursing job and helping raise her school-aged children, who are now home full-time, all while taking online courses toward a master’s degree from Western Governors University (WGU).

But Talarico, of Euclid, is taking it all in stride, as she and her family navigate life during COVID-19.

“Everybody is experiencing such a total change,” she said.

Talarico is an operating room nurse at a large Cleveland hospital. While surgeries have continued, she has also been cross-trained to assist as needed on hospital units with COVID-19 patients.

“The pandemic has definitely impacted every aspect of our workplace,” she said. “Every day there are different regulations in place to help protect the safety of the patients and employees. There are briefings daily. It’s more stressful and mentally exhausting than before.”

Talarico has been in the health care field for almost 20 years, starting out as a nursing assistant. She attended Kent State University, but said she was unable to fulfill the clinical rotational obligations for a nursing degree because she was working for the Cleveland Eye Bank at the time.

She left school about the time she had her first child, but still dreamed of becoming a registered nurse. So she enrolled at Lakeland Community College and received an associate degree in 2016. It was then she enrolled in online Western Governors University to get her long hoped-for bachelor’s degree in nursing.

“At Lakeland I had to take a part-time job in order do the clinicals,” she said. “I wasn’t able to fit in that traditional educational path, which is why I loved the competency-based setup at WGU.

The advantages of WGU, which currently serves more than 3,000 Ohio residents, include allowing students to earn their degrees by demonstrating what they know and can do (their competencies) instead of sitting in classes. WGU students move through courses at their own speed and pay a flat-rate tuition for each six-month session.

Talarico received her bachelor’s degree from WGU in April 2019 and then decided to enroll in the school’s Master of Science Nursing program with a focus on leadership and management.

“I looked at many different programs and when I spoke with an enrollment counselor at WGU I realized the competency-based set up made sense to me,” she said. “I had been in the medical field for many, many years, so my knowledge base is helping me get through certain classes more quickly than if I was sitting in a traditional brick and mortar school with semesters.”

She is also able glad she can take courses on her own time because her hospital schedule of four, 10-hour shifts a week is so unpredictable.

“Pre-Covid I was able to move ahead in my school work,” she said. She signed up for her third six-month term in January, but her progress slowed when COVID-19 created new pressures at work and her children have been at home all day.

Talarico’s husband is a heavy equipment operator, an essential job that has allowed him to continue work during the pandemic. Their son, 17, is a high school junior and has been doing his coursework at home and their daughter, 6, gets together with her first-grade class on Zoom multiple times a week.

“When Covid began I was in the middle of a course and part way through a paper,” she said. "I got messages from my WGU course mentor and program mentor asking if I was OK. They told me to take my time, that they believed in me. They support me, which is something I did not get at previous schools.”

Before the pandemic, Talarico had planned to complete her WGU coursework this term, but now she plans to enroll in a new term this summer.

“I was progressing at a rapid pace prior to the world changing,” she said. “I try to do one course-related thing a day. Even if work 10 hours at the hospital, I can use the app on my phone during breaks to look at course materials.”

Her future aspirations are focused on the field of nursing.

“I want to change how we treat each other as nurses and why we all decided to choose the profession of nursing,” she said. “I want to bring that back into the mix more and focus on building each other up. The health care field is difficult enough and you need a good support system.”