All the ingredients are coming together for Miriam Peguero. Wait till you see what she does with them.
Saturday mornings were the sweetest for Miriam Peguero. They meant customer pickups at her sister’s Los Angeles-area bakery, where Peguero decorated special-occasion cakes based on a client’s chosen theme or whim. Biggest successes: a Baby Yoda cake pop and, best of all, a Thomas the Tank Engine. “That one looked, like, really legit. I was really proud of it.”
Meanwhile, Peguero also worked as a teacher, tutor, and curriculum developer, and held jobs in sales and consulting. It had all made her financially solid, with a house in Tarzana, a valley suburb about 15 miles from downtown LA. (Peguero admits it can feel like 1,000 miles with traffic.) And each Saturday, she had those happy customers to meet.
But for the graduate of the University of Puerto Rico, where she grew up dreaming of a career as a caregiver, the call of nursing had become harder to resist.
The mortgage was saying “No,” but Peguero’s friends knew her heart was full “Yes.” So they nudged. A friend studying architecture at Columbia University in New York City told her, “There’s this nursing program here, and you should apply.” On the way to meet the Columbia rep, she instead bumped into a recruiter from the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing (JHSON) and, well …
The MSN (Entry into Nursing) program at JHSON promised a ticket to pretty much anywhere. Even back to Tarzana, where Peguero still shares—and plans to keep—the dream house with her sister.
“I’m very logistics-aligned and practical,” Peguero explains of her quandary when the acceptance letter arrived. She had been chosen by lottery from thousands of applicants to attend a high-intensity associate nursing program in California, and had already begun classes. “At the same time, I was like, ‘It’s Johns Hopkins!’ Right?”
“In nursing, “It’s also the details to making people feel better, happy and healthy. That’s special for me too.”
Right, reassured a nurse friend at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center: “If the only thing that is holding you back is financial, just go.” And, the friend added, “You’re going to love Baltimore.” Peguero confirms that she does adore the city—even the cobblestones of her new Fells Point neighborhood that recently sent her to Johns Hopkins Hospital for surgery on a broken foot after she stepped awkwardly out of a Lyft.
(How were the nurses? “They were all really great,” she reports.)
“Living in Baltimore while going to school has been a great learning opportunity,” Peguero says. “That perspective of humanity, of how that community where you live has been set up in a way that is affecting your health care. I can see that in California too. I bring that kind of experience of understanding further how your health has been affected with the experience of being a Hopkins nurse.”
The foot is healing and the financial worries have eased, thanks in part to a Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) scholarship. HRSA offers grants to help solve community needs, and this scholarship “allows me to get a job wherever I live as long as I work with an underserved community,” which has been the plan all along. “Because I’ve been to those health clinics where they need a Spanish speaker [Peguero is fluent] and they don’t have that, and I end up helping people.”
In Tarzana, “I live very close to a big medical area where they serve many different communities.”
Thrown into the Mix
Peguero left Puerto Rico after undergrad (biology) to join a sister headed to California. The cake thing happened once they lured a third, younger sister—trained as a pastry chef at Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena—back from Puerto Rico, where she was helping others start baking businesses. Why not have her own in LA?
“Her recipes were traditional Puerto Rican cakes.” And little sister recognized good help when she saw it. “I’ve always been the artsy-crafty one,” Miriam Peguero explains. A quick lesson or three in cake decorating later, the training wheels came off.
“My sister had a lot of confidence in me being able to make things for the first time to sell. It was really thrilling. It’s amazing the things you can do, and I would have never gotten into it if I wasn’t put in the position to do that.”
Peguero finds commonalities between making custom cakes and nursing. “In regards to baking, it’s all the little details and knowing that everything you do will make it special for someone else.” In nursing, “It’s also the details to making people feel better, happy and healthy. That’s special for me too.” ◼