Zahra Rangwalla

Biography

Zahra Rangwalla almost let the opportunity to join the MSN (Entry into Nursing) program at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing 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. “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.

“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 and embrace the decided advantages of having a sister who’d already experienced much of what he was about to go through.

Read more about Haider and Zahra Rangwalla’s journey to the MSN (Entry into Nursing) program.