Lorena Ulloa ’15 And Her Journey to Nursing and Public Health

“I always tell people,” Lorena Ulloa ’15 begins, “that going to Grinnell was by far my best decision to date.” I am speaking with Lorena over Zoom on her day off – tomorrow, she’ll be back in the hospital, on the go, on her feet, puzzling out one patient’s needs after another. It’s a demanding affair. “Nursing...nursing takes the cake,” Lorena laughs, but she revels in the variety of the challenges faced on the job.

Lorena Ulloa came to Grinnell as a first-generation student and a Posse Scholar. Though she grew up in Los Angeles, CA, both of her parents were born in small, rural towns in Mexico. When it came time to apply to colleges, Lorena knew she wanted to study in an intimate, small-town setting like the homes they had spoken so fondly of. She’s an exception, in this way – many Grinnellians have told me they decided to attend college here despite the rural location, rather than because of it.

Lorena entered Grinnell highly interested in medicine, participated in the Grinnell Science Project pre-orientation program, and declared her majors in Biology and Spanish by the end of her first year. Though she debated between majoring in Biological Chemistry and Biology, Spanish had been an obvious decision to her. Lorena felt tied to the language and to her Latin American heritage — she wanted to grow in her understanding of Spanish while at college, rather than losing her grasp of the language.

In her third year, Lorena studied abroad in Santiago, Chile, with the IES Health Studies program and, “absolutely fell in love with the country.” There, her identity felt uncomplicated. At Grinnell, Lorena had often wondered if she was “Latina enough,” but in Chile, it didn’t even feel like a question. Immediately after graduation, Lorena returned to Chile. “I knew I needed a year off from being a student, but I wanted it to be a productive year, academically and professionally,” she recalls. So, she scoured the universities in Chile, looking for researchers she thought she’d enjoy working with, and sent hundreds of cold emails to laboratory directors. She ended up joining not one, but two labs at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, splitting her time between a molecular development research group and a neuroanatomy group.

While in Chile, Lorena decided that she would pursue her Master’s in public health upon return to the States. Still very interested in the medical field, Lorena planned to pair her public health degree with a clinical degree, but she first wanted to gain experience with prevention, outreach, and education — working with people before diseases developed.  She returned home in 2016 to enroll in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. In the year after receiving her MPH, Lorena worked as a medical scribe in a hospital dermatology practice. “As a scribe,” she explains, “you kind of have to become the doctor’s brain. After a few months, it felt like I had the whole practice memorized.” A life of work as a physician, Lorena realized, would be too routine for her.

At the same time, Lorena was volunteering at a hospital in a liver transplant ward. She recalls being in awe of the work the nurses were doing. When codes were called, they were the ones who were running the show. Lorena saw that nurses weren’t tied to any one specialty. She saw in their work the intellectual variety that she worried a career as a physician would lack.

Lorena decided to enroll in nursing school at UCLA, graduating last year with her R.N. degree and her Master’s in Nursing Science. Her degrees have opened many doors for her: if she wants to, she can work in bedside nursing, in public health, within the school system, in nursing management…. For a philomath like Lorena, the array of options is exciting. “I want to always feel like I’m being intellectually challenged,” she tells me. How very Grinnellian.