Leaving the Orchestra for the Operating Room

Sean Barnawell went back to school at Rutgers School of Nursing as a nontraditional student to become a nurse anesthesiologist. Now, he is creating a nursing scholarship.

Sean Barnawell came to the realization in his 20s that his planned career path of playing guitar and double bass wasn’t going to pay his bills. Leveraging his experience as an orderly at a nursing home, he turned to the nursing profession.

“I saw the kind of work nurses do at the nursing home and thought it might be a good way for me to find my way into the middle class by getting a skilled profession,” he says.

While in nursing school in Chicago in the ’90s, he saw a demonstration on putting breathing tubes into a manikin’s trachea. That’s when he knew he wanted to be a nurse anesthetist.

“I thought that whole thing looked exciting and important—it's a form of rescue really,” he says. “That got me interested in the whole science of anesthesia. The science was engaging for me—pharmacology, how the gas behaved physically, the gas and airflow and oxygen.”

Years later, he applied to Rutgers University’s burgeoning nurse anesthesia program in Newark that led him to a satisfying, lucrative career as a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA)/nurse anesthesiologist. Thanks to his new skills, he was able to position himself so well financially that he has named Rutgers in his will to create a scholarship to support undergraduate or graduate students at the Rutgers School of Nursing.

Barnawell says he wanted to make a significant gift in gratitude for Rutgers giving him a chance as a nontraditional student.

“The year I turned 60, I began to think about what legacy I'd like to leave behind,” says Barnawell, who began the nurse anesthesia graduate program at age 40. “That gave me the idea of a planned gift of one of my retirement accounts. That account would not be here in that size had it not been for me being given the opportunity to prove myself by being admitted to the CRNA program.”

Barnawell and Lorraine Ford

The scholarship will be named after him and his wife, Lorraine Ford, his college sweetheart whom he married in 1992, a voice major he met at Indiana University Bloomington, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in music performance.

Rutgers Gave Him a Chance 

Shortly after graduating from Indiana, Barnawell and Ford moved to Chicago, and he enrolled in Rush University’s College of Nursing, earning his bachelor’s degree in nursing in 1995. Other than a brief stint at an IT help desk, he spent the next ten years as a nurse before returning to school. 

Admission to a CRNA program is competitive, so Barnawell applied to several schools, including Rutgers, which he learned was starting a new program in Newark. A proud New Jersey native, Ford nudged him to apply there.  

“Lorraine said, ‘Are you even going to apply to that school? The deadline is approaching!’ and I said, ‘Yes, yes, I'm going to apply,’” says Barnawell, who grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. “I applied and they granted me an interview.” 

Though he had been out of school for ten years, his acute care nursing was still active through practice in an emergency department and anesthesia recovery settings, so Rutgers accepted him as a nontraditional student based on his experience and his successful interview.  

“They gave me a chance to prove myself and allowed me that opportunity,” he says. “It made me feel like I wanted to give a little bit of that back. It would've been easy enough for them to say, ‘No, he doesn't meet the typical criteria. Don't even give him an interview.’”  

In 2005, Barnawell found himself in the second cohort of the newly formed program. Two and a half years later, he graduated with a master’s degree in nursing with a specialty in anesthesia, a specialty Rutgers offers now at the doctoral level. 

Barnawell earned his master's from the Rutgers School of Nursing in 2008.

A typical day for Barnawell begins at about 6:15 a.m. to prepare the day’s cases, which could be fusion of the spinal vertebrae, colonoscopies, orthopedic surgery, or surgery for weight loss, along with trauma care, resuscitation, and surgery for trauma. 

“Making a difference for patients who are suffering by treating their pain, treating their anxiety, and making their surgery possible—it feels like a privilege to be part of this collective effort to cure people with surgery and anesthesia,” he says.