From ADN to Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner

Making a career change requires more than ambition. It involves risk, financial planning, long hours of study, and the willingness to begin again.

Adam Mayfield had already built a professional life in business and hospitality when he began to feel called toward work rooted in service and meaning. With a long-standing interest in psychotherapy and psychiatry, he decided to return to school to pursue nursing. After earning his RN and entering psychiatric practice, he quickly realized that to grow in the field, he needed to continue strengthening his academic foundation.

That decision led him to UIC’s Online RN to BSN program and ultimately positioned him for the next step toward becoming a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner.

In the spotlight below, Adam shares how the RN to BSN experience shaped his growth as a nurse and clarified his path toward advanced practice.

A Career Shift Toward Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing

I earned a Bachelor’s in Business Administration and worked primarily in the entertainment and hospitality industries until I decided to change careers to nursing. Most of my family are in helping professions, and I decided it was time to find that same kind of meaning in my professional life.

A job I had years earlier as a claims adjudicator for Social Security first got me interested in working in the mental health field, and that interest stayed with me. After becoming licensed as a registered nurse, I began practicing psychiatric nursing on an adult inpatient psychiatric unit. I also immediately started my BSN coursework through UIC’s Online RN to BSN program.

I felt that the program emphasized the patient-centered, evidence-based nursing principles that are essential in psychiatric mental health nursing. Learning about how social determinants of health have such a profound impact on outcomes was particularly eye-opening in my work with patients experiencing severe mental illness, including unhoused populations and those with substance use disorders.

Skills from UIC’s Online RN to BSN That Strengthened Clinical Practice

UIC’s Online RN to BSN degree strengthened my critical thinking skills and my mindset for evidence-based practice, which were first cultivated during my ADN program. It also helped me better understand leadership communication as I started taking on charge nurse responsibilities in a Magnet-designated teaching hospital.

The program’s emphasis on community health nursing also helped me identify my interest in community mental health and in working with underserved populations early on. I continue to build on those foundations every day in my graduate-level didactic and clinical coursework.

Faculty Mentorship That Changed the Direction of a Career

One of the most challenging academic experiences for me was completing a comprehensive community health surveillance and assessment for NURS 362: Nursing Health Promotion. The project required significant time and focus, and I was balancing it alongside the responsibilities of being a relatively new RN in an inpatient psychiatric setting.

At one point, I started to question whether I could realistically keep up with everything and considered withdrawing from the course on multiple occasions. When I reached out to Professor Nancy Sislow, she responded like an ICU nurse holding the hand of a coding patient:

“Don’t give up! Stay with me! I need you to fight right now! We’re going to get you through this!”

She refused to let me give up on myself and encouraged me to keep going.

There is little doubt in my mind that if I had dropped that class, I would not be where I am today—fulfilling the biggest dream of my professional career: becoming a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. As a nontraditional graduate student in my late 40s, I’m aware that I don’t have an infinite amount of time left in my career. Were it not for the generosity of Leonard A. Lauder and the persistent encouragement of UIC nursing faculty like Nancy Sislow, I might have missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this important step in my professional journey.

Professor Kate Tredway, who was also UIC’s Online RN to BSN Program Director at the time, took the time to answer my questions as a potential incoming student, even taking a phone call from home on a Saturday morning to answer my questions one-on-one. This kind of personal attention from UIC faculty really made all the difference for me.

How UIC’s Online RN to BSN Degree Opened the Door to a Full Tuition Fellowship

Being exposed to community health and population-based nursing in the UIC Online RN to BSN program helped me think more clearly about what I wanted my career to look like going forward, particularly if I were ever to practice at the nurse practitioner level.

For a class project, I had the opportunity to mentor with Dr. Karen Cotler, clinical assistant professor in UIC’s Department of Population Health Nursing Science. Learning about her work with the LGBTQIA+ population in downtown Chicago and the need for psychiatric providers working in tandem with primary care providers helped me envision a more specific pathway for my future practice and how I might serve members of my own community. Hearing about her work with underserved communities also helped me imagine one day supporting similar efforts through mental health therapy and medication management.

With the support of UIC faculty and experiences like this in the RN to BSN program, I was able to further envision my goals and pursue the next step in my career. I applied to the Master of Science in Nursing Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner program at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was accepted and named one of the 2025 Leonard A. Lauder Community Care Nurse Practitioner Fellows, a prestigious fellowship that provides a full-tuition scholarship for advanced practice nurses committed to serving underserved communities.

Advice for ADN Nurses Considering UIC’s Online RN to BSN Program

My advice for future students, particularly my fellow ADN graduates, is to jump into your RN to BSN work as soon as you are able to. It will not always be easy to be a new nurse and manage coursework. Still, you will never be in a better position to have your education enhance your professional development and your work improve your educational development than when you are fresh out of school and beginning your career.

As you work to climb the educational and professional nursing ladder, you will meet people who try to stand in your way. Step around them and keep going. And do not be afraid to ask for help when you need it. That is how you find the supporters and the cheerleaders who help you cross the finish line. In nursing, just when you think you might be done, you often discover that the next exciting race is already right around the corner.