Sean Barnawell went back to school at Rutgers School of Nursing as a nontraditional student to become a nurse anesthesiologist. Now, he is creating a nursing scholarship.

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Sean Barnawell came to the realization in his 20s that his planned career path of playing guitar and double bass wasn’t going to pay his bills. Leveraging his experience as an orderly at a nursing home, he turned to the nursing profession.

“I saw the kind of work nurses do at the nursing home and thought it might be a good way for me to find my way into the middle class by getting a skilled profession,” he says.

While in nursing school in Chicago in the ’90s, he saw a demonstration on putting breathing tubes into a manikin’s trachea. That’s when he knew he wanted to be a nurse anesthesiologist.

“I thought that whole thing looked exciting and important—it’s a form of rescue really,” he says. “That got me interested in the whole science of anesthesia. The science was engaging for me—pharmacology, how the gas behaved physically, the gas and airflow and oxygen.”

Years later, he applied to Rutgers University’s burgeoning nurse anesthesia program in Newark, which led him to a satisfying, lucrative career as a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA)/nurse anesthesiologist. Thanks to his new skills, he was able to position himself so well financially that he has named Rutgers in his will to create a scholarship to support undergraduate or graduate students at the Rutgers School of Nursing.