For HTA Waipahu senior Natalee S, the goal has always been clear: She wants to work with keiki in a NICU unit. While many students wait until their college years to touch a stethoscope, Natalee is already building the foundation for her career. Through HTA’s Career-Based Learning program, she recently completed a grueling 112-hour Nursing Assistant course at the Hawai‘i School of Nursing — her first step toward becoming a certified clinician.
As the youngest person in her program, Natalee spent her Saturdays and long weeknights mastering a side of healthcare that people don‘t always see on TV. Certified Nursing Assistants are the behind-the-scenes backbone of any hospital. Doctors and registered nurses handle high-level diagnoses, but CNAs provide the vital, hands-on labor that keeps a facility running.
For Natalee, this meant learning a rigorous blend of indirect care — the soft skills of introducing herself, checking IDs, and building trust — alongside the physical demands of taking pulses, monitoring respiration, and safely changing and transferring patients.
“This is just a step toward what I actually want to do,” Natalee says. “I started by volunteering at Queen’s West last year because I wanted to work in a hospital, but I ended up mostly just restocking supplies and working in the gift shop.”
That realization pushed her to seek out the CNA course so she had a more direct role in patient care. The course moved her past the sidelines as she gained experience in the non-negotiables of the clinical field: patient dignity, professional empathy, and the strict safety protocols required to protect the most vulnerable populations.
This certification serves as the ultimate bridge to her future. She’s starting college with a major professional advantage — while most incoming freshmen are figuring out their first campus job, she’s eligible to work in a clinical setting from day one, gaining the kind of experience most nursing students don’t see until much later in their training. As she looks toward graduation, Natalee isn’t just preparing for a career — she’s already started it.
