Nursing duo: Daughter follows in mom’s footsteps

GREENVILLE, N.C.   (Dec. 14, 2012)   —   Iva Marie Winstead of Bath said soon after she started East Carolina University’s nursing program that she wanted her mother to pin her on graduation day.

Graduates receive the ECU nursing pin, with the university’s motto, “servire,” or to serve, one of the mainstays of nursing’s commencement rituals. Students in the first nursing class designed the pin more than 50 years ago.

Iva Marie Winstead, a new ECU College of Nursing graduate, looks at her mother’s nursing pin. Her mother is Lucinda “Cindy” Winstead, a nurse faculty member and ECU alumna. Photo by Cliff Hollis.

After asking permission from nursing administrators, Iva’s mom, Lucinda “Cindy” Winstead, a nursing faculty member, will fulfill her wish during the College of Nursing’s departmental ceremony on Dec. 15. 

A rowdy fall commencement for more than 2,000 graduates on Dec. 14 left 22-year-old Iva Winstead coated in confetti and Silly String. She enjoyed being with her friends as her mother joined faculty colleagues at the ceremony. While a great day, Iva Winstead said she is really excited about tomorrow. “It will mean more since my mom is pinning me,” she said.

Cindy Winstead will present her daughter the same nursing pin she received at graduation from ECU in 1988.   

The Winsteads had some of the same instructors, including Dr. Frances Eason and Karen Krupa. Dean of Nursing Sylvia Brown taught Cindy Winstead too. “It’s really been a unique experience for someone who taught me to also teach her,” said Cindy Winstead, who also earned a master’s degree in nursing from ECU in 2007.

“I’d like to thank my mom for being an inspiration and role model for what a mom and nurse should be,” Iva said. “I hope to be half the mother and nurse she has been one day.”

After spending the holidays with family and friends, Iva Winstead will take the National Council Licensure Examination next month. She plans to work at Vidant Medical Center in Greenville on the post-partum mother-baby unit in obstetrics, her mother’s specialty.

Iva Winstead was always interested in the medical field and had heard her mother talk about it all her life. But she became hooked through a job shadowing experience her senior year at Northside High School in Beaufort County.“I love being able to help people and be with patients,” she told her mother.  

Another nursing faculty member, Dr. Alta Andrews, pinned her son, Adam, at his graduation in May.