Adjunct Professor Jane Fox is a career nurse with 49 years of nursing experience under her belt. Reflecting on her 8 years of teaching at BYU, Adjunct Professor Jane Fox says, “this is one of the funnest jobs I have ever had.”
Professor Fox has lived in Utah Valley her whole life. She graduated from BYU in 1977 with her Associate of Science in Nursing. On the day of her graduation, she got engaged. “Initially, nursing was a way to put my husband through school,” she said. She started her career as a staff nurse in Critical Care at Utah Valley Hospital here in Provo, Utah. When her husband graduated a few years later, he told her she didn’t need to work anymore. But by then Professor Fox had grown to love nursing and wanted to continue her career, so she told him, “No. How can we make this work? . . .He has been supportive ever since,” she expressed.
After working in critical care for several years, she began working in case management. Professor Fox remarked that she “never aspired to be a leader” at the start of her career. However, that is exactly what happened; she served in various leadership positions during her career until she was promoted to be the Director of Cardiac Services at Utah Valley Hospital. “All along the way, I thought, ‘How did I end up here?’ I really think Heavenly Father had a plan for me,” she added.
Her career has been motivated by her love for making a difference for others, whether that was the people she was leading or her patients. She loved being able to take care of cardiac patients for many years— “they come at their most vulnerable time; they put their trust in us,” she said. When she moved into leadership positions, she missed being able to directly take care of patients. But, she added, “it gave me the opportunity to take care of my staff.”
Throughout her career at Utah Valley Hospital, she had many opportunities to teach her staff during EKG, Cardiac Life Support, leadership, and other classes. Professor Fox enjoyed teaching so much that she then decided to pursue a master’s degree in nursing education. She completed this degree in 2012 while continuing her career at Utah Valley Hospital.
This degree prepared her for the next stage of her career—professorship. After 41 years at Utah Valley Hospital, she was ready to move on. However, she wasn’t ready to leave nursing. One day, she was sitting in her hospital office looking at BYU’s website and thinking about potentially teaching at BYU. That day, Dr. Renea Beckstrand, a BYU College of Nursing professor getting clinical hours at Utah Valley Hospital, happened to pop into Professor Fox’s office. Dr. Beckstrand said to her, “Jane, you’ve been on my mind. You need to come teach at BYU.”
“I think Heavenly Father was putting things in line,”
said Professor Fox.
She currently teaches the N492 Capstone class, where her role is to get students ready to be fully-fledged nurses by the time they graduate. “It’s so fun to see them at the beginning of the semester with that 'deer-in-the-headlights' look,” she said laughingly. She meets with her students throughout the semester at their clinical sites to assess their progress and set goals with them. For Professor Fox, success is rooted in growing her student’s confidence. She said, “On that last visit, when I go to see [the students] and they say, ‘I get this. This is fun. This is what I want to do’—that’s success.”
The mission of BYU College of Nursing is very important to Professor Fox. She said, “to learn the Healer’s art and go forth to serve—that’s what I’ve tried to do with my nursing career.” In addition to educating her students, she ensures they are spiritually educated, “I try to tie in a spiritual thought with whatever we’re talking about that day... it’s been really refreshing to be able to talk of the gospel and about Jesus Christ,” she said.
If she could have the students remember one thing about her classes, she remarked, “I would want them to know that I truly cared about them, and that I wanted to make a difference for them.”