Man starts at university as a janitor, graduates as a nurse a decade later

A man who worked as a janitor at New York University’s Langone Tisch Hospital as a teenager recently graduated from the university with a nursing degree nearly a decade after first working there.

Frank Baez, 29, told Good Morning America in an interview released on Wednesday that he “could barely speak English at the time when I started working at NYU.”

{mosads}“Now I reflect on it and I feel very proud of how much I accomplished,” he continued. 

Baez told the news agency that he and his mother relocated from the Dominican Republic to New York when he was 15 years old. He said his job with the hospital was the first one he picked up in the country shortly after the move.

It wasn’t long after he started working with the hospital that Baez said he began to develop an interest in working in medicine.

“While working [at NYU] with the nurses, I realized I wanted to be one of them. I learned how much they advocate for their patients and the passion they have for their job,” he said. 

Baez eventually left his job with the hospital to pursue a degree at Hunter College. There, Baez said he later became the first person in his entire family to finish college. 

But Baez said he wasn’t satisfied with stopping there. So, he decided to go back to New York University, this time, as a student at the university’s Rory Meyers College of Nursing.

Natalya Pasklinsky, the director of simulation learning at the nursing college, told GMA that Baez passed the program with “flying colors.”

“What I did was, I never gave up,” Baez told GMA. 

“I was never an A student. I just studied a lot and worked a lot,” he also said. “Of course there were times I doubted myself, but then I felt that I wanted to do something more for myself, that I deserved better, that I wanted to continue to move forward and grow and go on with my life.”