SPRINGFIELD – Around 20 nursing students hopped into a five-foot pool at a gymnasium on South Sixth Street, wearing scrubs on April 30. Crazy, fun, and excitement ensued.
The soon-to-be-former-students played “chicken” in the water, splashed each other, and made lots of noise, in a tradition that dates back to the early 1980s.
45 students in total are graduating from University of Illinois Chicago’s College of Nursing, which operates at University of Illinois Springfield.
As graduating senior Grace Kadyk of Sherman put it; the tradition brings a chance to wash off the stress of nursing school.
“Nursing school is so stressful. So this is just a great way to relax with my friends. We did it. A lot of us don’t even have finals to take anymore. It’s really cool,” Kadyk said.
Next for Kadyk will be a job in pediatrics at HSHS St. John’s Children’s Hospital. She looks forward to working with children and giving back to central Illinois.
Andrea Salgado, of Chicago, did not plan on participating in the celebration because she does not know how to swim, but she was beaming afterwards, sopping wet in her scrubs alongside her friends.
“I had so much fun. I’m here with a bunch of my friends. I love them so much, and I had more fun than I anticipated,” she said, adding that the tradition is a nice way to say goodbye to classmates.
Following graduation, Salgado will be working at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in the Intensive Care Unit.
“I’m going to be dealing with neuro patients – like stroke patients, seizures, head injuries, a lot. So I’m going to be taking care of them,” she said.
Nobody knows exactly how the swimming pool tradition began, but it started in Chicago in the fall of 1981, according to now-retired college staffer Denise Rosen.
In the early 1980s, students made the plunge in swimsuits and their official nursing aprons, Rosen said on a webpage for the college.
The tradition was adopted in Urbana in 2008 and in Springfield in 2019.
Tom Ackerman covers breaking news and trending news along with general news for the Springfield State Journal-Register. He can be reached at tackerman@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Nursing students celebrate graduation with a splash in Springfield
Reporting by Tom Ackerman, Springfield State Journal-Register / State Journal-Register
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