"Upon graduation from Mount Holyoke College in 1955, I expected to..."

 
Hi, my name is Eleanor Graham Claus, and I am known as Ellie. The question posed to me is what did I expect when I graduated from Mount Holyoke College? I have two things I thought about, and it's nice to get these ahead of time to be able to ponder them. Number one, as you know, many of us expected that we would be engaged or pinned/engaged, or married by the time we graduated. Well, I had the pin and I was going to be engaged so I anticipated that marriage would be; but that was not the reason I went to Mount Holyoke. I was interested in becoming a doctor, and, my father, who was a physician, said ' oh no, a woman really shouldn't be a doctor, it's really tough' and this was in the fifties. 'You should become a nurse'. Well, I looked into that and I did decide to do that. Mount Holyoke had a five year nursing program where you went to college for three years and then you went to the nursing school at Hartford Hospital, in Hartford, CT for two years. You spent the summer after your sophomore year and the summer after your junior year learning the basics in nursing. And so in our class, there were four of us who actually graduated the program. So, my goal was, obviously, to meet the science requirements, and that is what I needed to do in three years, because if I didn't finish nursing school, I wouldn't get my degree from Mount Holyoke. So, my two expectations were number one, that I would complete the nursing program because that was going to be the foundation for my career,. and then I would get married. So, indeed, that's what did occur. I had worked ever since I graduated from college in Healthcare, and then later on in life, when I was about 35, I got a Masters at the University of Pennsylvania in Community Nursing Administration. So I've been the route of managing healthcare programs, to managing a hospital, to managing a large healthcare system. So for me, what Mount Holyoke gave me was a liberal arts education which was the foundation for me in everything that I did. Because I've been very involved with the college, my connections with all the various people that went to Mount Holyoke, regardless of age, has been a wonderful thing for me. My mother went to Mount Holyoke so I'm a legacy. My niece went to Mount Holyoke so I'm a great advocate for the educational program here. For me, it's been a platform for my success as a healthcare professional, and as an involved person, not only at Mount Holyoke, but in my community.