Psi Upsilon Member Highlight
Jeanne Widener, PhD, RN, CNE
Fifty years in Nursing with Jeanne Widener, RN, PhD, CNE
Much medical advancement has occurred in the past 50 years, and I was there to see a lot of firsts during my nursing career. Yes, I graduated from a diploma program at Mennonite Hospital School of Nursing (now on Illinois State University Campus) in 1976. Of the 35 who graduated, 22 came to celebrate our Golden Jubilee in April 2026. Yes, most are retired, but some still work part-time or full-time as nurse practitioners or home health nurses. Almost all earned their BSN later, about a third have a master’s degree (most as nurse practitioners) and 2 of us earned our PhD in Nursing. Several have taught nursing, but I am the only one to teach at WGU.
Back to the beginning, I graduated in Illinois but moved immediately to Missouri to work and take “boards”. In addition to being the 200th anniversary of the USA, 1976 was the first time the same nursing state board exam was administered in every state. Two days, eight hours a day of testing on paper with pencils and waiting several weeks for the results. Since you had to wait so long for results, graduates who had taken boards were allowed to start their orientation and 90-day trial period. I was able to start in a Cardiac Care Unit. No cap for me, since the doppler included extra-large headphones.
I moved from Missouri to East Tennessee and earned my BSN there at East Tennessee State University. While in school I found myself the relief charge nurse on the 8-hour night shift in a surgical ICU. I also tested for the CCRN (Critical Care Registered Nurse) credential that I continued to hold for 35 years. While in school, I met and married my husband and after he graduated with his Master of Divinity, we moved to Nashville to complete my Masters at Vanderbilt University. At that time, medical-surgical clinicians were utilized in the hospital to guide nurses, so I went that route instead of Nurse Practitioner. While in my Masters program, I worked at the bedside in several different intensive care units and was on call to assist with fluoroscopy placed lines in a suite on the unit. I was at the American Heart Association Convention the year PTCA (percutaneous transvenous coronary angiography) was introduced to the medical world. Now that procedure is very common. I was there the first-time calcium channel blocker IV push cardiac drugs were given on our unit that are now given at times on step down units. My research was able to be analyzed by entering the data into a computer screen rather than punch cards. Just a few of the changes I saw.
After completing my thesis defense, we moved to Kentucky and I stayed home almost 2 years with our first child. That was a different kind of nursing. When I needed continuing education units to maintain my nursing license and CCRN, I went to a hospital to ask and found myself working night shift again. No Nurse Clinician position open at this hospital and I only wanted part time as our family enlarged, so back to ICU. The director of nursing asked me to call someone to do her a favor and then I found myself teaching full time at Eastern Kentucky University for 9 years. In 1989, I was inducted into Sigma Theta Tau Inc. (STTI) as a nurse leader and held several offices in the Theta Nu Chapter. I was also active at the regional level. I taught medical-surgical nursing and most of the critical care concepts. Side note: one of my students is now the nurse manager for my daughter who is also an RN. I was granted assistant professor and tenure while there. My husband was hired in the Columbus, Ohio area, so off the family moved to join him.
In Columbus I once again worked in several different ICU settings and started my PhD at The Ohio State University. I chose to have dual membership with STTI, Epsilon Chapter while in Columbus. Interesting note: my Missouri nursing license had become inactive, so to get verification of my initial licensure for Ohio licensure, Missouri had to go into the vault and find my paper copy (they only had 20 years of records on the computer). Ohio was my 4th nursing license. The process to complete my PhD coursework went smoothly. I was a teaching assistant and then research assistant for several years to pay tuition and fees. I worked part-time in an ICU not associated with the university while completing my dissertation research. Persistence, not just high aptitude or luck get a nurse though a PhD program. By the time I graduated, my husband had a position teaching in eastern Kentucky and our children were both in college. People ask why it took so long? Lots of reasons, but having student health insurance to cover the family decreased but urgency to be done
While in Kentucky again, I floated through several different ICU in one hospital system, taught BLS and ACLS frequently, continued on a nursing journal editorial board, edited manuscripts and felt like I was well rounded in nursing, but found it hard to be active in STTI. Time to go back to teaching full-time. I obtained a West-Virginia nursing license (#5) and began teaching at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virgina. Again, I taught medical-surgical nursing to undergraduate students and lots of critical care content with clinical in those areas. It became too difficult to maintain clinical hours for CCRN, so I earned the Clinical Nurse Educator (CNE) credential I still hold. I was active in the STTI again through the Mu Alpha Chapter. In 2011, while attending the STTI convention in Texas, I heard about the Phi Gamma Virtual Chapter and joined another chapter. Again, I received tenure and advancement to Full Professor. All that time I became more active in Phi Gamma Chapter as Leadership Succession Chair, President-elect, and President of that International Chapter with members in 30 countries at that time.
My husband moved us to Oregon and colleagues from Phi Gamma encouraged me to apply at WGU. I was hired shortly after Psi Upsilon was chartered, so I was grandfathered in as a charter member. I taught at WGU for 6.5 years. We had moved back to Kentucky to be near grandchildren after my husband’s retirement, so activity in Phi Gamma and Psi Upsilon online has been easy to maintain. I am currently a Co-Chair for the Communications committee with Psi Upsilon Chapter and Leadership Succession Chair/Director for Phi Gamma Chapter of Sigma. (Yes, I was at convention when the name was changed from Sigma Theta Tau International (STTI) to Sigma. Another of the changes in our world.)