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Happy Pride Month! In celebration, we chatted with Mikhail Shneyder, President and Chief Executive Officer, as well as an owner of Nightingale College, an accredited, proprietary, post-secondary institution that specializes in nursing education, based in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is an experienced, visionary leader with a successful career of over 20 years of progressive management experience in health care services and post-secondary education for health professions. Through a generous gift to Haas, Mikhail and his husband also recently named the new Shneyder & Kirk MBA Commons on campus.

Mikhail is originally from Belarus. His family immigrated to the US when he was 19. Coming to the US was an eye-opener. All his childhood imagination dreams about America vanished immediately. Mikhail went on to do odd jobs for a few years, including dressing up as Barney in Times Square. However, after passing the RN licensure exam, he started to practice nursing.

In this episode, Mikhail shares the unique story behind their move to the US, his early experiences after moving, fully realizing he’s gay, and the dark part of his journey into finding and accepting himself and overcoming the challenges along the way.

We also get to hear why Mikhail is passionate about healthcare, his reasons for going to business school, and how he got into education. He also talks about the mission and goals of Nightingale and its plans for the future.

Episode Quotes:

On realizing that he's gay

“I really didn't understand. It wasn't spoken at all. Growing up, I didn't know the LGBT community even existed. It's an interesting thing of identity with me finding that eventually. But I didn't fully realize that I was gay until we moved to the States. And all of a sudden, it was like something smacking you in the face. I went like, ‘Wow. Oh, wow! Oh, it makes sense.’ All of this that I've been experiencing.”

Overcoming the darkness of finding his true self

“Climbing back out of what I described as darkness, really, took a long time. And as a human being, I think the biggest fear that one might have is fear of being in your own skin, fear of yourself. And so, for me, reconciling and journeying to self-acceptance and to my humanity, essentially, and recognizing it and learning about it and doing all of that. But it was many years of hard work, and everything from just becoming much healthier—from movement to meditation to all sorts of things—and then eventually arriving at this place of just peace.”

Why he is passionate about nursing

“I ended up being one of the caregivers to mom and learning through it all, started to understand what health really is and what health brings to an individual, a family, or a community, and the opposite of health, what illness does. And so, I became very passionate about it. It became absolutely clear that nursing is what I loved and nursing is what I have passion for, because of the care that it has at the heart of it because of what nurses can do for somebody who is on their worst day and supporting them, and nurturing them and allowing them and giving them the resources and tools and everything else and the support that's needed for somebody to get better and to flourish.”

Show Links:

• LinkedIn
• Nightingale College