Alumni Feature: Sean Calder, DNP ‘19
“I don’t like to wing it whenever I’m doing something; I like to be informed,” says Sean Calder, Doctor of Nursing Practice ‘19. “It’s really important to me to approach teaching in a fashion that had a solid background behind it.” That’s the mindset that led this former army medic to Chatham’s DNP program.
Calder is an Army CRNA Instructor at the Army Trauma Training Detachment in Miami, Florida. He’s also Associate Professor of Nursing at Florida International University, University of Miami and Barry University.
Pre-DNP, his military service involved serving overseas in Desert Storm in 1990, getting his RN license, and serving in an army medical treatment facility following 9/11. Then he was approached by a chief clinical instructor to become a CRNA, which required getting his bachelor’s degree. Calder did that and entered the Uniformed Services Graduate Anesthesia Nurse Program in San Antonio. After 2.5 years of study, he was deployed to Iraq, and went on a couple of humanitarian missions to Honduras, earning a master’s along the way. About ten years later, he knew he wanted to go into education, but didn’t have his doctorate. And as he says, he likes to be prepared.
“All advanced practice programs in nursing are transitioning by 2024 to requiring a doctorate,” he notes. “If I was going to teach, I had to have my doctorate. The DNP made the most sense for me because I didn’t have the time being on active duty to do a Ph.D.”
“I had a couple colleagues who had been through Chatham’s program and they highly recommended it,” he says. “I applied, got accepted in 2017, and then completed the program in 2019. Afterwards, I went and completed five extra courses and got a nurse educator certificate at Chatham as well.”
“One of the reasons I went to Chatham was because every class built upon your capstone project. Other DNP programs throughout the country don’t do that–you take courses and at the end you kind of piece everything together in this big project instead of building it. At Chatham, every course you take is like writing a chapter of your final project. When I finished, it made perfect sense.”
Calder’s capstone project addressed a common phenomenon that happens with active duty soldiers who have seen combat: if they’ve been in surgery, when they come out of anesthesia, they experience an agitated state where they can get combative, hurt themselves or others, they cannot be talked down or rationalized to because in their mind, they’re back in combat and they’re trying to defeat the enemy or survive. “I did a study in which I used an educational tool that was based on the current evidence to screen these potential surgical patients to see if they’re at risk for this kind of delirium. If they were, there was another tool that the anesthesiologists use, an evidence-based tool based on current research that showed to be the best for managing these patients, preoperatively, intra-operatively, and post-operatively,” he says.
“Every two weeks we get an army unit here, a full resuscitation surgical team that is due to deploy to a combat environment,” he says, “We train this team in a two-week course. It’s three days of didactics, two days of a mass casualty simulation, six full days of clinical within Ryder trauma center, which is the only stand-alone trauma center there is in the country. It’s quite busy. We’re kind of a credentialing entity that says you’re good to go, and we help pinpoint areas they need to work on, where their strengths are, things like that.” As an associate professor, Calder teaches online and acts as a subject matter expert in development of projects that may relate to military or trauma.
“There’s always that encouragement that you’re not done once you’re finished with your doctorate,” says Calder. “You’re an ambassador now, not just to your university but to your profession. So I’m involved with our state organization of nurse anesthetists, on their government relations committee. Since July I’ve had at least 35 congressional and senatorial meetings with national and state representatives in which we either advocate for certain policies or we act as educators for these senators or congresspeople as to what we do and why it’s important, and what they can do to help us, and how we can help them.”
No nursing program is alike, and at Chatham you are given opportunities that other programs can’t compete with. Explore the Doctorate of Nursing Practice now.