The Fuld Leadership Program
Fuld Fellowships

Mandy Dierking

Biographical Sketch
Reflections on the Fuld Fellowship
Making Beds Bigger, Nursing Magazine

Biographical Sketch

Mandy is a fourth semester graduate student in the Family Nurse Practitioner. Growing up going to school in the inner city of Louisville, Kentucky and having a mother who was a nurse helped to develop in Mandy a passion for underserved populations and health care. She graduated from Earlham College in 2001 with a Bachelor’s degree in biology and Spanish. After graduation, she moved back to Louisville and taught English as a Second Language to refugee students in a public inner city middle school. While she was passionate about advocating for and educating her students and their families, Mandy decided she wanted to serve the population in a different capacity: as a nurse, helping to build healthy families and communities.

Fluent in Spanish, Mandy has lived, traveled, and worked in Latin America and Spain. For five months, she conducted an on-site ethnographic study in Oaxtepec, Mexico in which she investigated the melding of indigenous and Western medicine in the rural village. She has traveled three times to Ecuador as a medical translator with the Timmy Foundation, a non-profit group focused on making basic health care and education available to all children. In the summer of 2005, she spent two weeks working with the public health director of the Fundación Tierra Nueva in Quito, Ecuador. This provided her with the opportunity to witness the improvisation and ingenuity of nurses working with indigent populations and scant resources. She has also traveled with the School of Nursing to the ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica three times to work with Missionaries of the Poor and has twice worked with the Farm Worker Family Health Program in Moultrie, Georgia. Most recently, she volunteered as an RN with the Timmy Foundation in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, providing health care for Haitian Refugees. She is scheduled to volunteer with the same community as a FNP in the spring of 2008.

Throughout her time at the School of Nursing, Mandy has taken various leadership roles with student organizations and has participated in and facilitated multiple volunteer and service learning opportunities, including work at Red Cross and Salvation Army shelters for Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Upon graduation from the BSN program in 2006, Mandy was voted by her classmates “Most Likely to Work with Underserved Populations” and received the undergraduate award for Leadership in Community Service. She is also a member of the nursing honor society, Sigma Theta Tau International. She presently serves as president of the School of Nursing’s Graduate Council and sits on the School’s Alumni Board.

Mandy worked for two years as an intern at the Lillian Carter Center for International Nursing. Once she earned her nursing license, she accepted a position as a registered nurse at a non-profit women’s reproductive health clinic, where she enjoys the opportunity to mix her clinical skills with patient education and advocacy. Thus far, Mandy has chosen to do her FNP clinical rotations at not-for-profit clinics that serve predominantly Latino communities. A firm believer that individuals and communities must be empowered with good health and education in order to thrive, she hopes to focus her future nursing career on health education and the development of community-centered health programs in international communities, both abroad and within the United States.

Reflection on the Fellowship

Fuld Fellowships