Three Nursing Students Win Awards for Gold Foundation Essays

Three nursing students have been awarded cash prizes for their essays in the 2022 Hope Babette Tang Humanism in Healthcare Essay Contest held by The Arnold P. Gold Foundation.

The annual essay contest encourages medical and nursing students to reflect on their experiences and engage in narrative writing. Students are asked to respond to a specific prompt in a 1,000-word essay. For the 2022 contest, students were asked to use the following quote as inspiration to reflect on humanism in healthcare, drawing from their experiences as an individual or as a member of a healthcare team (doctors, nurses, therapists, patients, and families, etc.):

“Creating a connected life begins with the decisions we make in our day-to-day lives. Do we choose to make time for people? Do we show up as our true selves? Do we seek out others with kindness, recognizing the power of service to bring us together?”
– Excerpt from Together: Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World by Dr. Vivek Murthy, U.S. Surgeon General and Vilcek-Gold Humanism for Healthcare Award recipient

More than 400 essays were submitted. A panel of judges, including healthcare professionals and notable authors, reviewed the submissions. Three winning essays from nursing students and three winning essays from medical students were selected, along with 11 honorable mentions. The winning essays will be published in consecutive issues of the Journal of Professional Nursing and Academic Medicine in the fall/winter of 2022.

Winners receive a monetary award of $1,000 for first place, $500 for second place, and $250 for third place.

The three winning nursing students are:

First-Place Essay:
Jessica Pierce, Oregon Health & Science University

Second-Place Essay:
Victoria Furka, University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Third-Place Essay:
Chelsea Huffhines, University of Kansas

Learn more about the Hope Babette Tang Humanism in Healthcare Essay Contest.