Noelle Roe has spent her life showing up for others. For 26 years, that meant serving in the U.S. Army: managing hospitals, deploying to the Middle East, and rising through the ranks before retiring in October 2023.
Now, it means something she never expected: becoming a nurse.
“I think I’ve found my calling. It’s because I’m needed.”
Noelle holds a bachelor's degree in psychology and two master's degrees: one in clinical counseling and one in space operations. She's a mother of three (one in high school, two in college). A second career wasn't part of the plan. But something shifted.
“But then everything clicked, and I realized I should become a nurse because I’m someone who lives to be of service to people, my community, and others,” she says, and is now about to graduate with her BS in Nursing from the University of Colorado Anschutz College of Nursing.
Learning to Think Like a Nurse
Noelle's military background gave her a strong foundation: leadership, composure under pressure, and even basic life-saving skills. But nursing, she discovered, required something different.
Did she know how to lead? Yes. Did she know how to manage people? Yes. Could she perform basic life-saving skills and treat a sucking chest wound? Of course.
“But actually being a nurse and having nursing critical thinking skills? I didn’t have any,” she says. “You have to look at the entire picture and use your knowledge, experience, and understanding to make judgment calls, and that’s what I learned at CU Anschutz Nursing.”
Part of transitioning from the Army and going back to nursing school was learning how to study nursing.
“I had to wake up my brain and retrain it on how to study,” she says. “I can memorize things. That’s easy. But in nursing school, you have to understand the content and apply it, so it’s very different. So, for my first semester, I lived at the library, sometimes studying all day.”
She eventually didn’t have to study for 12+ hours a day as she got further into the program, but it proves “sometimes you have to do what you have to do to make it.”
Noelle also suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) from an IED (improvised explosive device) when she was deployed, which impacts her auditory processing. It pushed her to work extra hard in the program so it wouldn't impact her ability to transition from the military to nursing school.
And her hard work paid off: Noelle is graduating with honors and will receive the Undergraduate Student Leadership Award at graduation.
The Nurse She Plans to Be
Noelle accepted a new graduate nursing position at UCHealth in the In-Patient Behavioral Health Unit and plans to become a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. But her deepest motivation is more personal.
She knows what it’s like to walk into a hospital or clinic and have a healthcare provider not listen to her or take her concerns seriously. It happened to her and her daughter, and it’s something Noelle doesn’t want anyone else to experience.
“I want to create a safe space for patients where when they see me walk through the door, they’ll go, ‘okay, she’s here for me, and she understands me',” she says. “I want to provide the best possible care I can, and I’m going to use my skills to do everything I can to help.”
She doesn't have to do any of this. For Noelle, that's almost beside the point.
“This is what drives me, I want to be the person who provides care to people,” she says. “I want my kids to see that you can do anything you want, you just have to work hard to get there. And it’s never too late to start something new.”
