Michelle DelPrete
Hometown: Rockland, Mass.
Major: Nursing

This fall Michelle Delprete had a hard decision to make. As co-captain of the women’s soccer team last year, she loved the sport and her team. But the demands of her nursing education made full participation impossible.

“I couldn’t mix clinicals and soccer,” she said. “I couldn’t give 100 percent to either and I didn’t feel good about that.” So the former sweeper and outside back decided to end her soccer career, after playing three years for the college. “I miss it,” she says. “But it’s not as though I’m going to be a professional soccer player.”

What won DelPrete’s full attention is the final year of her nursing studies and consideration of what she will do after graduation. She is leaning toward emergency room nursing or perhaps an intensive care unit, after she spent a summer internship in the cardiac surgical ICU of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

“I loved ICU,” said DelPrete, who also belongs to the Seton Society. “It’s fast paced and interesting. You get cases right from the operating room. I like how it’s so focused and nurses play such an important role.”

She will not make her final decision, however, until she completes her maternity and pediatric rotations this year.

DelPrete always knew she would enter the medical field, but did not settle on nursing until her final year in high school in Rockland, Mass., when she and her best friend volunteered at Tufts New England Medical Center.

“The experience of helping a patient is just awesome,” she said. “In the ICU, you might have had a really busy day, lots of things are happening and you’re thinking, oh, I’m so tired. Then a patient says, ‘You’ve been wonderful. Thanks for everything.’ It’s just so gratifying.”

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