Frank Baez moved to New York City from the Dominican Republic with his mom when he was 15 and he could barely speak English. The teen got a job as a janitor at New York University’s Langone Tisch Hospital to help support his family and now he’s 29 and just graduated with a nursing degree from the same institution.
Over his years on the job, Baez became interested in the medical field and became a patient transporter. He finished his Bachelor’s degree at Hunter College, becoming the first in his family to graduate from college. And after working with the nurses at NYU, he wanted to become one of them, so he applied to NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and excelled in the program, graduating with a 3.6 GPA.
"I was never an A student. I just studied a lot and worked a lot," Baez explains. "What I did was, I never gave up.”