Zahra Rangwalla happily leaves a trail for brother Haider to follow. He’s embracing the experience … and the insights.
Zahra Rangwalla almost let the opportunity to join the MSN (Entry into Nursing) program at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing (JHSON) slip through her fingers. She wasn’t about to let her younger brother Haider make the same (almost) mistake.
“I have a really good friend, and he dared me to apply. ‘I’ll pay your application fee.’ And I told him, ‘You’re gonna waste your money.’ I didn’t think I’d get in,” she explains. “And he’s like, ‘OK, I’m willing to take that bet on you.’ ”
He won that wager. Still, Rangwalla wavered, showing up to Accepted Students Day with one foot remaining outside the door. She’d done her homework before heading to Baltimore. Top-ranked program, check. Amazing faculty and happy, well-employed alumni, check and check. Yeah, but …
Anyway, up walks the student ambassador of the year, who proceeds to maybe oversell JHSON just a smidgen: “You’re gonna have so much free time!” Nevertheless, “his enthusiasm and positivity really just drew me. The more I learned about faculty, the more about staff, even looking at the campus …
‘Oh, I have to do this.’ ”
Fast forward a few semesters, and it was Zahra doing the cheerleading. Haider Rangwalla had been accepted to the Master’s Entry program and came to Baltimore to check the place out. The weather extremes spooked him, and still do. “We’re from Southern California,” says Haider of their temperate hometown, Riverside. Determined not to let him waffle as she did, Zahra called in the troops.
“Whenever I’m going through a tough class, it’s like, ‘All right, my sister got it. I can too.’ ”
“My friends and I just gave him the full Baltimore Experience: We went bowling. We took him to the best restaurants, our favorite bars. We have our Taco Tuesday traditions with my friend group, so we adopted my little brother like, ‘You’re part of us.’ It was a good time.”
Good enough that Haider decided to overlook any hot-and-cold impressions of Baltimore, focus on Johns Hopkins and its people, and embrace the decided advantages of having a sister who’d already experienced much of what he was about to go through. It sure beat what he had been doing: “I was working as a home inspector and doing other stuff over the last two years and was thinking, you know, ‘This is not me.’ I didn’t want that for the rest of my life.”
Besides, the profession had been calling to him since, well, Mom was pregnant with him as she worked toward her own associate’s degree in nursing. (He arrived during finals week, of course.)
Today, while Zahra looks eagerly toward May graduation—“It was a great program. I’ve loved every second of it. But I think I’m ready to move on and go work”—she’s happily providing White Coat-tails for her brother to keep riding on from there. Both are basically following in their mother’s footsteps, headed toward careers in pediatrics. A children’s hospital nurse for about 15 years, Mom now works as a lactation consultant.
Baby steps
The job hunt for Zahra starts with a list of pediatric intensive care units. She did her practicum at Johns Hopkins Hospital’s PICU and felt right at home. “Kids are just my favorite. And then I love the intensity of the ICU,” she explains, calling herself passionate and extremely particular or even a bit OCD, a type A personality who thrills at the sight of “all the bags and IV lines and everything just
so organized and hung up correctly.”
Haider’s focus on pediatrics is a bit more theoretical at this point in his program. “I want pediatrics,” he explains. “Whether that’s going be an ICU floor or whatever is still up in the air. I haven’t actually done an ICU anything, so I think I want to actually experience that before I decide anything.”
Not to worry. Zahra is certain to report back from the PICU. “I’m sure he’ll beg me to be quiet about it.”
And Haider is cool with making the most of his cheat code while he still can.
“Whenever I’m going through a tough class, it’s like, ‘All right, my sister got it. I can too,’ that kind of thing.” As members of separate cohorts, the siblings don’t bump into each other all that often at school, but afterward, she’s just one floor down and one room over at the Essential, an apartment complex designed for Johns Hopkins students. If he’s got a question on a key point in the curriculum, Zahra can spell it out for him. “That’s awesome,” he admits.
For her part, Big Sister is simply paying it forward. “If I can be a guide for Haider and his friends, I’d love that because, when I started the program, it just so happened where I had a friend from high school who started a semester before me. I remember leaning on him so heavily for what to expect and how to successfully navigate the program. Just remembering how much I appreciated it, I’m more than happy to do that for my brother. I only want the best for him.” ◼