From the Baseball Field to the Bedside: Jake Benoit Finds His Place in Nursing

Jake Benoit did not grow up planning to become a nurse. When he entered college, his plans had much more to do with baseball than healthcare.

But looking back, Benoit can see the threads that eventually pulled him toward nursing: an early appreciation for relationships, experience caring for older adults, and a growing realization that he wanted a career built around direct connection with people.

Today, as a pre-licensure student in Duke’s Master of Nursing program, Benoit is beginning to see how those threads might shape the kind of nurse he becomes.

A Path That Took Time

Benoit grew up watching his mother, an occupational therapist, develop meaningful relationships with her patients. As a child visiting her outpatient clinic, he remembers playing with the toys there and hearing about patients who invited his mother to barbecues and oyster bakes.

“She was really connected with her patients, and that always stuck with me,” he said.

So did being part of a team. Benoit played baseball throughout his childhood and entered college on an athletic scholarship. At the time, choosing a career felt less urgent.

“I had played baseball my entire life, so I was pursuing a dream,” he said. “I always wanted to play college baseball.”

He studied business, partly because its breadth left his options open. But after COVID-19, Benoit reexamined his plans. He transferred schools, stopped playing baseball, and began reconsidering where he was headed. He finished his business degree while taking science prerequisites that could lead toward nursing, physical therapy, or physician assistant studies. Outside the classroom, experiences increasingly pointed him toward healthcare.

Through a company that connects aspiring health professionals with older adults who need assistance, Benoit worked as a caregiver. He also worked alongside registered nurses in another job and began asking them about their careers.

“I knew I wanted to be in a clinical environment, provide care to people, and develop relationships,” he said. “That’s how I landed on nursing.”

He ended up in the MN program, designed for those who already have bachelor’s degrees in non-nursing areas, which Benoit says appealed to him. “With people coming from all different backgrounds, I knew I wouldn’t feel out of place."

Learning Beyond the Classroom

Nursing school has challenged Benoit in ways he expected, and in some ways he did not.

The academic demands were familiar. What surprised him was how much of becoming a nurse happens through observation and repeated experience in clinical settings.

During a recent pediatric clinical experience, Benoit cared for a 5-year-old with asthma who was understandably unhappy about being in the hospital. He watched clinicians give the child small choices, including the opportunity to help hold a stethoscope. The approach gave the child some autonomy while allowing the care team to complete necessary tasks more easily. Those small interactions have helped Benoit recognize the difference between knowing clinical information and knowing how to apply it.

“The depth of learning that occurs outside of the classroom surprised me,” he said. “There are little things in clinical environments that you pick up over time that are so important.”

At Duke, simulation and skills practice in the Center for Nursing Discovery allow Benoit to work on those details before encountering them in patient care. Students can return for additional practice when they want more experience with a particular skill. He has also learned from clinical instructors with different specialties, patient populations, and approaches to care.

“You get different instructors who work on different units, with different specialties, and each has their own perspective,” Benoit said. “Nothing is one size fits all.”

Finding Community in a Demanding Program

Relationships, Benoit said, are his favorite part of nursing school. 

“I would say, overall, it’s the relationships and the approachability of everyone, whether that’s professors, clinical instructors, or other students,” he said.

A recent interprofessional workshop brought nursing students together with people from medicine, physical therapy, social work, and chaplaincy to consider a patient case from multiple perspectives. Experiences like this one are helping Benoit understand both how health professionals work together and what kind of clinician he wants to become.

“I was always told nursing school and medical school were really competitive, kind of a dog-eat-dog situation,” he said. “Duke has none of that.”

Instead, Benoit has found faculty members willing to listen, answer questions, and connect students with others who can help them explore their interests.

“I’ve never talked to somebody who has left me feeling less capable,” Benoit said.

Deciding What Comes Next

Benoit is now at what he calls a “pivotal spot” in his education as he considers his fourth-semester preceptorship and, eventually, his first nursing position. His immediate interest is critical care or an intensive care unit, where he hopes to strengthen his clinical judgment, prioritization, and time-management skills.

Longer term, Benoit is considering becoming either a family nurse practitioner or a certified registered nurse anesthetist. Family practice appeals to the part of him that values sustained relationships.

“You get to see people across the lifespan,” he said. “If you work in an outpatient clinic, you can have these patients for their whole lives, basically.”

But Benoit has also come to realize that meaningful relationships are not necessarily defined by their length. His girlfriend’s mother recently told him how much it meant when a CRNA spent time with her before surgery, explaining what would happen and building trust during a frightening experience.

“To be an integral part of making someone feel more comfortable and connected would be fulfilling for me,” Benoit said.

For now, he is comfortable not knowing exactly where nursing will take him. He plans to build experience as a registered nurse before making a decision about advanced practice. It is a far different course from the one he imagined when baseball defined his college plans, and he hopes his experiences may resonate with someone else who is still deciding where they fit.

“It took three people telling me, ‘You should apply. At least give yourself the opportunity,’” Benoit said. “Maybe [someone who hears my story] will say, ‘You know what? I’m going to apply,’” he said. “And it changes the whole course of their career, like it did mine.”