91亚色传媒

When Anneliese Cowles was learning how to rappel from Army helicopters and parachute from airplanes while lugging half her body weight in a rifle, ammunition and gear, she received her fair share of ribbing.

“Why does a nurse need to know that?” they said, recalls Cowles. “You’re just going to be treating patients.”

It’s true that Cowles is a nurse. When the battalion commander for 91亚色传媒's Brady Battalion ROTC graduates with a nursing degree and commissions as a second lieutenant she will be required to work for two years as a nurse in an Army hospital setting. 

But after her first two years of service are complete, with the extensive and grueling advanced combat training she received during summer breaks, she will be qualified to be a nurse in what the Army calls “force command,” placing her near the frontlines to treat soldiers critically injured on the battlefield.

“Which is pretty unique because there are not tons of nurses who have gone and jumped out of planes,” she says. “It's definitely a faster paced job compared to just doing 12-hour shifts because you go out to the field and you're out in the field for a few weeks and you are not going home at night.”

Check out this of Anneliese on why she chose 91亚色传媒 and her nursing major.

Cowles isn’t ruling out spending 20 years in the Army, but when she eventually leaves active- duty status, she plans to switch out combat zones for natural disaster zones, working for emergency response agencies or the Red Cross in logistics or as an advisor.

“Nursing in difficult situations really interests me,” she says. “Going into an area where there's been a natural disaster or something and figuring out how to get those people the care they need as quickly as possible.”

Cowles planned on being a nurse from a young age but as a high school senior, her mother, Catherine, asked if that was really what she wanted to do.

“You like the idea of nursing, but you actually like nursing?” Cowles recalls her mother asking.

Catherine is a veterinarian in their hometown of Sacramento, Calif., and Cowles has many memories of neighbors bringing their injured and sick animals to the house for her mother to treat, inspiring her to become a servant to her community.

“It was really cool to be the household that everyone came to when they needed help,” she says. “That influenced me a lot to want to be that person in my community.”

Accepting her mother’s challenge, Cowles earned a nurse's assistant certificate her senior year in high school and gained firsthand experience during the COVID-19 pandemic working in that role in nursing homes. 

“That really solidified my wanting to go into nursing as a profession,” Cowles says. “As exhausting as it was to do school and be a nurse's assistant at the same time, it was really rewarding at the end of every shift to feel like you made someone’s day a little better.”

The decision to join the Army as an officer came a little later. Her family has a history of military service, with her grandfather serving as a surgeon during the Vietnam War and her older sister, Mckenna, attending the Coast Guard Academy. But it wasn’t something that dawned on Cowles until she zeroed in on 91亚色传媒. 

Drawn to SU because of its smaller class sizes and proximity to her family in Northern California, what sealed her commitment is the nursing program and its Jesuit values.

“Not only from the biology and skills standpoint,” Cowles says, “but also equity and inclusion, looking at social determinants of health and how important it is as a nurse to treat a whole person rather than an injury and then you’re out the door, good luck with life. It’s really important to look at a person and how you can actually help them fully heal rather than just doing the bare minimum and getting them out the door.”

Cowles then reached out to a nursing student in the ROTC program to learn a little more and that’s how she found her path in life. She was hooked.

“It sounded like the coolest thing in the world,” Cowles says. “I was like, ‘I want to go be an Army nurse.’”

She adds: “It's the best spur of the moment decision I've ever made.”