Nicole Newman and Eleanor Reiner have been best friends since they met at a Baltimore-area dance camp when they were in middle school. Later, they were  counselors at the camp while in high school.

“We loved working together, and we loved working with kids,” Reiner says. But they had no firm plans for the future until they happened upon a life-changing two-week mentorship program at The Johns Hopkins Hospital during their senior year.

“It was the most incredible experience of my entire life,” says Newman. After just two weeks of shadowing nurses and surgeons and anesthetists, they both knew they wanted to become pediatric nurses. Even more specifically, they wanted to work on the Johns Hopkins pediatric intensive care unit (PICU).  “It just set us on a very direct path,” Reiner says.

Five years later, both women have realized their dream. They are nursing school graduates (Georgetown University for Reiner, James Madison University for Newman) and are well into their second year as Johns Hopkins RNs on the PICU.

“Nicole and I keep saying it’s like something out of a Disney movie, where we were childhood best friends and ended up doing this together in the exact place we wanted to be,” Reiner says. “And it wouldn’t have happened without Aileen.”

She is referring to Aileen Mendez, a Johns Hopkins certified registered nurse anesthetist who 10 years ago, with her colleague and fellow nurse anesthetist Soo-Ok Kim, launched a two-week high school mentorship program in pediatric operating rooms.

“We’ve mentored 20 students, and I am so proud of them all,” Mendez says. “Eleanor and Nicole are just amazing. I see them all the time, and watching them work so hard, be so driven and successful and super happy — I just feel like a very proud mom.”

From the beginning, Mendez was determined to make the program exceptional. “You want them to see how extraordinarily exciting it is to do what we do,” she says of the students. “Everyone in my department loves teaching and is so welcoming, and I think that’s why this has been so successful.”

Says Newman, “I saw open-heart surgery on a baby and brain surgery. We got to do things I didn’t get to do for the entire first three years of nursing school.”

Newman and Reiner say that even through the most grueling days of nursing school, their memories of the mentorship experience kept them motivated — “because we’d seen firsthand how exciting the work is,” Reiner says.

“Probably the most important thing we learned was just to feel comfortable asking questions,” Reiner adds. “Learning that it was safe to ask ‘why?’ is a big part of patient advocacy, and it’s what the Hopkins culture is all about.”