Sara Milne

New Fairfield resident Sara Milne graduated early from high school, started taking classes at Western Connecticut State University and joined the women’s Rugby Club on campus. Since she was only 17 at the time, she earned the nickname “High School” from her teammates. Sixteen years after her WestConn graduation, she is far removed from high school, and has continued her trend of getting ahead of the game.

“I always knew I would go to WestConn because my older sister had gone there for a Marketing degree,” Milne said. “Initially, I was an undeclared student and took a lot of my General Education requirements before deciding to focus on Nursing with a minor in Psychology.”

During her senior year at WestConn, Milne worked as a Patient Care Technician at Danbury Hospital. This not only gave her hands-on experience, but also provided her with tuition reimbursement. She had lived in Connecticut her entire life and knew she wanted to travel and see more of the world. At a Nursing Career Day, she visited with a recruiter from the U.S. Navy, and was excited to learn that she would have the possibility to experience many different coasts as a Navy nurse.

Following her 2009 graduation, Milne received her medical clearance from the Navy, and once her passing score on the NCLEX exam came back, the Navy officially accepted her into the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps. Soon, the traveling she coveted began.

Sara Milne

“I took officer basic training for five weeks in Newport, Rhode Island,” Milne recalled. “Then I was stationed at Walter Read Military Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland. After two years there, I was stationed in Yokosuka, Japan.”

While at Bethesda, Milne worked as a charge nurse in a general medical-surgical unit. In Yokosuka, she gained experience in labor & delivery and the emergency department. After she fulfilled her five years of service commitment, she left the Navy and backpacked through Europe before returning to her roots in Connecticut. “I worked in the ED at Stamford Hospital for about a year,” she said. “I took a travel nurse position in New Haven, then worked in the ER at Greenwich Hospital and the cardiac and vascular unit at Bridgeport Hospital.”

For the past three years, Milne has worked for Premise Health, which offers on-site occupational health and wellness services at several area business, including at Boehringer Ingelheim, where she works as a contractor. Milne also recently was featured in an article in Today’s Nurse, after they reached out to her on LinkedIn.

Looking back, Milne said she’s glad she got her degree at WestConn. “Our clinical rotations were at many different hospitals, which gave us a wide range of options and provided a lot of hands-on learning,” she said. “As a group, our NCLEX test results were great, and that resulted in immediately receiving a job offer after graduating, and also helped when I applied to graduate school for my master’s degree. Everyone along the way said, ‘WestConn is a very rigorous program,’ and they were right.”

Milne continued, “I tell anyone who asks me, including my stepdaughter, that absolutely they should go to WestConn. It’s a great university — especially the Nursing program — and it’s right in our backyard.”

Western Connecticut State University changes lives by providing all students with a high-quality education that fosters their growth as individuals, scholars, professionals and leaders in a global society. Our vision: To be widely recognized as a premier public university with outstanding teachers and scholars who prepare students to contribute to the world in a meaningful way.