(Greet mo muna lahat ng nandun, for example, the honorable eke k, dean keme , director churva.etc..) Good afternoon.

Thank you friends, family, and colleagues for the opportunity to be here today. It is a great honor and pleasure to graduate from our beloved Northeastern College Nursing Department but also a great privilege to work and tearn up with many of you.. My classmates are a mix of some of the best people I know and it has been a pleasure learning from you. I wish to express my appreciation to the faculty and staff of the nursing department who mentored and shared their skills and knowledge to help start us on this adventurous path. I wish to express my deep gratitude to my family for their love and support. I know that each of us has someone at home that motivated and gave encouragement to keep working and do the best that we could. I also know that our families at home often sacrificed more than we did so we could attend this beloved institution. Thank you. We did it! Do you remember just a few years ago sitting in those uncomfortable chairs listening to our clinical instructors and our dean go over the program and list of requirements? Trying to figure out what was expected and learning the names of the people we would spend so much of our time with. I dont know about everyone else, but this time flew by. Honestly, I will miss seeing all of you, but I wont really miss being a student, I will just miss our frequent interaction and the friendships we have developed. Nursing is a fantastic profession. I would like to talk about the novice to expert evolution that takes place in nursing. I am positive this same process takes place in all lines of work, I am also sure that the consequences of being a novice in nursing is shared by very few other professions. I can say comfortably that my classmates are all expert nurses. We come from different cultural backgrounds, and we all excel in our individual fields. We had to earn that rite of passage from novice to this point and it was done with some degree of hard work and stress. We now stand here today on the edge of another large step in our professional growth. We prepare to leave a stage in our careers that we are expert caregivers to a role that we are again novices. We will start out feeling small, asking a lot of questions and worrying about diagnosis that we make or if that was the right medication to order for the patient. Our clinical teaching and critical thinking skills will be fully useful to its existence..

In reality, when we start our new practice as a new graduate nurse, we are going to have to hit the ground running and also face a really steep learning curve. Just remember we have a rich background that will serve us well, the lessons we have learned in class and in clinicals, and using evidenced based practice knowing where to get the right answer, we will progress down the path of novice to expert. Do expect blood sweat and tears along the way (hopefully not our own blood). I am so excited about the potential that awaits us. Doors will be opened in places we didnt know there were doors. The country and the medical community are waiting for our contribution and we will enjoy the successes and the confidence of someday being an expert nurses in our own field. And lastly, I would like to address to you my viewpoint on what has been trending nowadays with regards to a belittling statement from a senatorial candidate. Madam: I am proud to be called a nurse. And not just any nurse. I will be a nurse of the Republic of the Philippines. And I will be proud to be one. As a nurse, I have come to know of the hardships, trials and difficulties that my fellow pinoy nurses face in our beloved country. It is not easy being a nurse. It takes dedication, perseverance and hard work. Most importantly, it takes not only intelligence, but HEART. So telling your co-Filipinos who have chosen nursing as a profession that they don't even need to have a BSN because they only want to work abroad as a ROOM nurse and that they don't really need to be good because they are only there to care for others is too much of DISRESPECT. We offer four long years of our young lives profusely studying our brains to exhaustion. Some of us proceed to even greater heights and attain Master's and Doctorate Degrees. We strive hard to get a job. And when we do, we work our butts off to SAVE LIVES. We forgo sleep, have little food, barely drink water, run around and barely rest, and squeeze our innovative minds to the fullest just so we could do our job well. We swallow our pride and clean other people's messes for them. We give less time to our own families, just so we can give more time to yours. We face insults everyday with our heads held high. Insults like the ones you just uttered. Insults that degrade our lovely profession into something less than it really is. Insults that see us professional nurses as mere slaves. Thats all. In the long run, lets Just all be be proud and continue to shine in our chosen career path. We can do great things for people as a nurse. We can be a witness of

Christ and enrich and comfort and heal Gods children. Remember Gods hand is in everything and be ready and able to be an instrument in his hands. You are entering a scared trust that few professions share, the healers art. Amen.