Music as Medicine Scholarship Fund

I graduated nursing school in 2020 and I dove straight into the COVID healthcare experience. I personally started out in a tough trauma hospital on an adult oncology/medsurg/inpatient hospice floor. I saw a lot of suffering and death that was so hard for me to process and even harder for me to find someone who I felt I could talk to about it. My husband and I married and we moved to Florida when he got restationed; I started over here as a pediatric oncology nurse and later got a second job as a pediatric palliative and hospice nurse. Peds is definitely where I am meant to be, but that feeling of having so much to cope with and nobody who could relate grew exponentially. Let's be real, who in my non-nursing life is ever equipped to talk about dying children? Ironic as it sounds, I found peace within the rock, metal, and alternative music community. A lot of this music is a safe way to deal with themes of death, loss, and survival while coping with heavy stuff. This year Welcome to Rockville (the biggest rock/metal festival in the US!) fell on Nurses Week, so I arranged a nursing meetup. Turns out, there are so many others like me - nurses who love rock, metal, and alternative music! And seeing it in person really healed something in me. This led me to create a group called Music as Medicine, comprised entirely of healthcare professionals who use rock, metal, and alternative music as "medicine" for our own mental health. The intersection of healthcare professionals and rock/metal/alternative fans is super specific, but super powerful. Together we show people it doesn't matter if you're visibly alternative, love the heaviest mosh pit, or cry at the screamy show: you can still be an educated, caring professional. We mentor incoming healthcare professionals and support seasoned ones. We stop burnout in its tracks by providing community, encouraging this unique outlet, and fostering a love for both each other and alternative music.