I had Aaron in both my first and second semester clinical groups, and a common question asked by the other students and me was, “Where’s that student?” The answer was always undoubtedly stuck in a patient’s room doing the absolute most while the rest of us would huddle together around the nurse’s station mentally running through our head-to-toe assessment and anxiously creating our medication list. He has this aura around him that immediately makes all of his patients like him, and I believe it is because he treats everyone he encounters like family.

Time and time again, I have watched him go above and beyond for not only his patients but also for others. I can recall one time, as my clinical group and I made our way to post-conference, excited to end our day, he was once again nowhere to be found. It was only later discovered that he had noticed a random dirty patient while on his way to meet the group, and instead of telling the tech or the nurse, he decided to clean the patient himself. He left clinical an hour or so later than the rest of us, simply helping because he wanted to. Anyone else I know would have complained about walking into that situation and having to stay late like that, but he never uttered a word about it. This moment, however, is not an isolated event, and these seemingly small moments where he goes above and beyond happen at every single clinical. He puts his heart into everything he does and is quite literally “always doing the most”. He not only survived nursing school like the rest of us, but he also did so with a double major in Spanish and working in the Housing Operations Services department on campus. It is his resilience, warmth, dedication, positivity, and passion to serve that is going to make him an amazing nurse, and it has been my greatest privilege to complete this program with a friend like him by my side.