When Danny Aguiar applied to Barry University, he knew he wanted to play on the Buccaneers baseball team – but he wasn’t sure what he wanted to study. He took classes in athletic training and in exercise science, but he didn’t feel he had discovered the right career for him. Then his physiology professor suggested that he consider nursing. The aggressive outfielder had doubts at first, mostly because of the common stereotypes about nursing being a woman’s profession. “You don’t know the options you have until you get into the field,” he explains. Now he is so enthusiastic about the opportunities in fields such as wound care and anesthesiology, Aguiar even convinced one of his team mates, the Buccaneer’s catcher, to major in nursing as well.

Currently, men make up only six percent of the more than 2 million nurses in the United States. That number has held steady despite efforts in recent years to recruit more men to the profession. “We socialize people at a very early age that little boys grow up to be physicians and little girls grow up to be nurses,” says John McFadden, a current student of the PhD in nursing program as well as an assistant professor and director of Barry’s anesthesiology program. That socialization is reinforced by the essence of nursing itself. “Nursing is synonymous with caring, nurturing, and mothering,” Professor McFadden points out. “It’s really taking men a long time to embrace those attributes and make them their own.” He was admitted to medical school but rejected that opportunity in favor of nursing because, “I like the approach nurses take to patients better than the approach that doctors take.”

That’s a sentiment shared by Barry senior Jevon Olea. A native of the Philippines, Olea was encouraged by his physician brother to go to medical school. Instead he followed the example of his mother, a nurse. “My brother objected at first, but now he’s supportive,” he says. He recognizes that he’s made an unusual choice. “I’m the only guy in my clinical group,” he observes. “But I look at other classes and see the number of male nurses growing. I feel strongly that this is the right field for me.” A senior, and president of Barry’s Nursing Students Association, Olea looks forward to specializing in pediatric nursing.

Thomas Roznovsky, a sophomore at Barry’s School of Nursing, discovered that he enjoyed working in the operating room while serving as a maxillofacial technologist in the U.S. Navy. After completing his BSN, Rosnovsky hopes to return to active duty as a Navy Nurse Corps Officer. “I love the patient care and the hands on treatment,” he explains. Having a more balanced gender representation in the field might also make patients more comfortable, depending on their personal or cultural preferences, he suggests. Through his coursework at Barry, Roznovsky has learned that culture plays an important role in health care. The School of Nursing emphasizes multicultural health, providing lessons he believes he can bring back to his work in the Navy.

Men are playing an important role as nurse educators and are reciprocally producing future nurses to address the nursing shortage that currently exists in the nation. Professor Gene Majka and Dr. Daniel Little are both on faculty at Barry’s School of Nursing. Majka teaches Community, Public Health and Mental Health Nursing. He is also presently enrolled in the doctoral nursing program at Barry and works primarily with the migrant population with his students in Homestead and Florida City. Majka confesses “I fell into teaching by accident and ended up loving it.” He admits to entering nursing because, “I like the big picture nursing offers and the interaction with the patients.” He enjoys being a nurse educator and says he cannot see himself doing anything else but just that.

Gene Majka with nursing students in Homestead

Dr Little has 20 years experience as a nurse and eleven years as a nurse educator. Little was inspired to enter nursing after being impressed by the level of care and dedication a nurse provided to his friend who suffered from Leukemia. He was then influenced to be a nurse educator by a good friend and a previous dean at Miami Dade College. He went on to complete the RN to MSN bridge program which prepared him to be a nurse educator. Dr Little is very dedicated to his career as a nurse educator. He also has a degree in Linguistics, Music, Business and Psychology but prefers to teach nursing. Both Gene and Daniel are members of the American Assembly for Men in Nursing.

All these men chose nursing over other professions.