Ann Preston Roselle ’98

Ann Preston Roselle ’98 chose a career in nursing thanks to her high school nurse, Nancy Wible. Ann says, “I really loved and respected how the students at my high school responded to her compassion and empathy. I entered nursing school fully intending to become a school nurse.” Although Ann never followed in Nancy’s footsteps in terms of being a school nurse, she certainly has shared her ability to show great compassion and empathy to her patients. Ann often hears that she knows how to connect with her patients on an exceptional level and that she simply “gets” the people she is treating.

Ann believes she makes a difference every day in her profession. She feels that she can relate to her patients due to her own experiences of dealing with postpartum onset bipolar 1 disorder. She says, “Therapy makes you a more compassionate, more empathetic provider at the end of the day. The students I teach all comment that they can see how I connect with my patients on a unique level, even though my patients have no idea what it is they are connecting to. They just know their provider respects what they have to say and how they want their treatment plan carried out.”

Most of Ann’s career has revolved around surgical and medical critical care, including working as a nurse practitioner in cardiothoracic surgery service at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and working in the cardiac surgery group at Yale New Haven Hospital with several other CSC grads. She eventually changed jobs to a private practice that focuses on geriatric psychiatry and dementia management, where she currently serves as a psychiatric nurse practitioner.

Ann attributes her career’s success to the nursing program at Colby-Sawyer College. She says, “The nursing program provided me with a solid foundation. The faculty we had while I was here were always supportive, willing to listen, and so giving of themselves. How could one not be successful with a foundation and faculty like that?”

When asked about her favorite memory of Colby-Sawyer, she fondly recalls having the number one room draw for campus during her senior year. She remembers many of her classmates offering her bribes to not pick the rooms they had their hearts set on, yet none of them wanted the one she wanted to begin with. She also remembers being part of many extracurricular activities including Campus Activities Board, intramural softball and the parking appeals committee, until she was kicked off for accumulating too many parking tickets!

These days, Ann lives with her husband Keith and three sons, Liam (10) and twins Elis and Noah (8), in Bethany, Connecticut. She is an avid book collector and loves to read in her spare time. Ann is currently working on her doctoral degree in psychology at Rush University. She loves being a nurse and believes there is a specialty for almost anyone. She says, “You don’t have to get pigeonholed into one particular area and stay there for your entire career. At one point in time, I truly believed I would never leave cardiothoracic critical care and yet, here I am, completely at peace and at home in psychiatry, truly feeling like I make a difference every day.”