For Mary Ann Scoloveno, a professor of pediatrics in the College of Nursing for the past three and a half decades, the caregiving profession beckoned early on. There was little soul searching. As she saw it, career-minded women in the early 1960s faced fairly simple choices.
“There was not a lot to do – you were either a teacher or a nurse,” recalled Scoloveno, who managed to achieve both. After earning a bachelor’s degree at Seton Hall University and a master’s at Columbia University, she joined the faculty at Rutgers, while also working as a nurse practitioner. In her spare time, she earned a doctoral degree.
Scoloveno clearly made the right choice.
“I see it as instant gratification,” she said of her nursing theory and laboratory classes. “But it’s also challenging. There are health and medical changes all of the time, and you need to keep up.”
But for her son, Bob, a clinical instructor, whose office is just down the corridor from hers, the route to nursing was a little more circuitous.
“He would have laughed right in my face if I’d said he should become a nurse,” said Mary Ann, herself laughing, as she and Bob sat in her office one morning explaining their professional proximity.
It certainly was true that when Bob was first considering career options nearly two decades ago, “there were many fewer men in nursing,” he said. Instead, he worked as an optician until the company he worked for ran into financial trouble and laid him off. It was a turning point, and he never looked back, realizing that he was not comfortable in a retail setting.
“I left without a job and was trying to figure out what to do,” he recalled, “and at some level realized I always had been interested in nursing. I kept coming back to it.” But it was the more than three months he spent in the neonatal intensive care unit with his first son, born prematurely, that sealed the deal.
“To watch nurses take care of babies in that setting was like intense on-the-job training,” he said, adding that he first thought about becoming a physician’s assistant. And that was when his mother was emboldened to say, “Be a nurse.”
He plunged right in, starting with an associate’s degree and then landing a first job in the cardiothoracic unit at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick. But as his mother was, he also was drawn to teaching. And shortly after earning his master’s degree, he got the chance: a call on a Tuesday from a College of Nursing dean asking him to report that Friday and teach a clinical class in adult care.
While sharing many professional values, including an approach to nursing that emphasizes the whole patient rather than his or her condition, mother and son sought out very different patients. “I started in maternity and then moved into pediatrics,” said Mary Ann. “For the most part, these are patients who don’t die. They’re very resilient.”
But Bob said that it is much easier for him to treat adults.
“Mom is in pediatrics, but I was able to determine that was not for me. I think I would have internalized too much,” he noted, adding, “I love coaching children in the Little League, but I wouldn’t want to take care of them.”
While Mary Ann said she always has kept a certain distance – so that Bob doesn’t “feel he’s on my coattails” – there are inescapable “Mom’’ moments on the job. Her workplace – and now his – is a significant part of his childhood landscape.
“I’ve been walking these halls for a long time, since I was little,” Bob said. “Some of these professors used to give me sticks of Juicy Fruit.”
Mary Ann sometimes gets notes from students that mention Bob. “One student came by and said, “I have to do well on my exit exam – for Bob.”
And they tattle too.
“If I don’t do a recommendation quickly enough, they’ll tell Mom,” Bob said, “and she’ll call.”
She, too, has her “Mom” moments.
“I’m very proud,” she said.