Sally Snow never had a doubt about what she wanted to do when she graduated in 1974 from The University of Texas System School of Nursing, precursor to the UT Arlington School of Nursing.

As a member of the school’s first graduating class, she had the experience of being taught in a small classroom at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth. Each day she would hear the overhead paging system call doctors and nurses to the emergency room—STAT! It was all she could do not to jump out of her chair and run.

“Emergency nursing always intrigued me because the patients arrived with no diagnosis and no orders to follow,” she says. “You really had to conduct an investigation to determine what’s going on. It is much more collaborative—doctors and nurses working together—because you don’t have time to mess around.”

Snow started working the 3-11 p.m. shift at JPS immediately after college. JPS was the only emergency room in town that had a doctor on staff after 6 p.m. She was charge nurse within a year and has continued to work her way up the managerial ranks.

She left JPS in 1988 and became manager of the trauma program at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth in 1994. The trauma service oversees the care of more than 750 injured children each year.

— Becky Purvis