Many people aspire to dedicate their lives to a single calling. Dr. Carrie Nero—a 2021 USF Alumni Award recipient—has lived a life of service in two. With more than three decades of a career in both nursing and the military, Nero has touched countless lives, overcoming many obstacles and becoming a trailblazer in the process, including as the first African-American nurse to achieve rank of brigadier general in the U.S. Army Reserves. Decades earlier, growing up in a segregated St. Petersburg, Nero began to find one of her callings during a game with her sister – playing hospital as doctors and nurses, their dolls and pets serving as pretend patients. The games were a fun break between chores and school work overseen by a strict grandmother who cared for them while their musician parents were working out of town. “When I was coming up, my grandmother was one where you didn’t go out into the neighborhood. It was school, home and church,” Nero recalled laughing. “I could hear my grandmother saying, ‘You need to get your education.’” As Nero moved through high school in the 1960s, the few career opportunities open to Black women at the time included school teaching and nursing, if one didn’t want to work in domestic service, she said. From the games with her sister, Nero had progressed to volunteering as a candy striper at the Crippled Children Hospital, a facility that predated today’s All Children’s Hospital. The experiences cemented her desire to pursue a career in nursing in order to help people.
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