Nursing major Tiffany Spizzo ‘23 ‘25 has accepted her dream position as a NICU nurse after returning to Ramapo for a second degree 

May 7, 2025

by Lauren Ferguson

The more chaotic things get around Tiffany Spizzo, the calmer she becomes.

It’s an observation that her eldest daughter, Courtney, often makes about her mother, who at 51 is set to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Ramapo College of New Jersey this month. It is also a trait that undoubtedly helped Spizzo – a longtime yoga instructor – as she juggled class, clinicals, studying and family life in pursuit of her degree, and one that will serve her well in her new dream job as a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) nurse.

“I think my yoga just makes me really calm. It’s part my personality, and part what I have learned, just like how to be calm, be efficient, but be on my A game, and just be able to focus and get done what needs to get done,” she explained.

When Spizzo and her now husband TJ – the class couple for Mahwah High School’s class of 1992 – got pregnant with Courtney, now 31, they were freshmen in college. Spizzo dropped out of Kean University to get a job with health benefits, while her husband stayed at Rutgers on a full football scholarship.

Now, three decades and four daughters later, Spizzo will be stepping into a career she said, “really is a calling for me.”

In the simulation lab at Ramapo, students like Tiffany learn how to deliver care to patients like this newborn, set up to respond as human patients might.

Discovering Her Calling through Ramapo Clinicals

When one of Spizzo’s clinical professors, a nurse practitioner in pediatrics at University Hospital Newark, first took her into the NICU, Spizzo said “I walked in there, and they said, ‘Okay, you are going to get right in, you are going to see what we do here,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, this is what I am meant to do,’” she said.  

Backed by the training she received from Ramapo’s mentoring, experienced nursing faculty, Spizzo has accepted a position as a NICU nurse at Hackensack University Medical Center, which provides the highest level of care for newborns with complex medical needs. She is set to start working the overnight shift in August.

She said the babies she will work with are “probably the most vulnerable of all the patients we have,” and she is looking forward to “being able to help them get healthy, help them thrive, and help them grow, and teach their parents and help them feel confident like they can do this, and they can take care of this baby.”

Spizzo’s professors are confident she will make a difference in the lives of her patients and their families.

“She has every quality that you could ever want in a student and a nurse,” said Professor of the Nursing Lab and Simulation Debi Nickles ‘11, who earned her MSN in Nursing Education from Ramapo. “She is caring and empathetic and intuitive and smart.”

Bringing Past Experiences into the NICU

It has been a long road for Spizzo to get to this point – one full of experiences that she will take with her into the NICU.

After dropping out of college, Spizzo worked for six years as a pediatric dental assistant. On off days, she would accompany her boss to the hospital for charity cases. The pair would spend all day in the operating room, as the dentist reconstructed the mouths of babies and toddlers whose teeth were decayed from bottle mouth – doing root canals and putting on crowns. They would also help babies with cleft lips and palates be able to breast and bottle feed, by making impressions of their mouths, then creating plastic roofs to fix to the tops of their mouths. 

“I think that is where my love for being in the hospital started,” she said.

Then when Spizzo had her second daughter, Bethy, now 22, she became a stay at home mom. She stayed home for 11 years, and also had her daughters, Kate, now 18, and Lolo, now 16. Spizzo eventually became a yoga instructor and taught kids’ and family yoga classes so she could bring her girls along. She also worked in schools throughout the tri-state area teaching mindfulness and meditation as a social emotional learning tool.

Enrolling Back in College

At 46, with one daughter out of the house, one in high school, one in middle school and one in fifth grade, Spizzo decided the time was right to go back to college. She enrolled in Ramapo, a few minutes down Route 202 from her Mahwah home. In May 2023, she earned a BA in Contemporary Arts / Professional Communication through Ramapo’s Degree Completion Program which provides returning adult students with flexibility to finish their undergraduate degrees. 

She wasn’t done. After completing science prerequisites that summer, she enrolled in Ramapo’s dynamic nursing program, and joined a group of students who were all closer to her daughters’ ages than her own. 

“My professors have been my biggest cheerleaders. They have always checked in on me, given me great advice,” she said. One professor, she said, told her to make friends with other students.

“That was the best advice,” she said. “Sometimes I think I am going through things in my head, and I am like, I am so old and I can’t get it, or I’m so tired, and then I start talking to my friend group, and they start saying things, and I am like, thank you for saying that, because it makes me feel like normal,” she said.

Besides the support from her professors and friends, “the beautiful thing about this place and this program is that I got exposed to so many different kinds of nursing,” she said. “I was able to shadow a school nurse, I was able to do home health, I’ve been to five hospitals throughout my clinicals, and gained exposure to all different kinds of nursing and all different cultures of nursing, and all different ways a hospital is run.”

Ensuring Family Success

For the past couple years, nursing school has dominated Spizzo’s schedule. “My whole family has really had to adjust our whole lives around it,” she said. Her husband has been so supportive, but they spend less time together, and she literally goes from class or clinical, then up to her home office to study until late at night. Still, she strives to make time for her family. She put a beanbag chair next to her desk, so that when her daughters get home from school, practice or a game, “they plop themselves down on the beanbag chair and update me about their day,” she said. 

Because they struggled early on, Spizzo and her husband have always stressed the importance of education to their daughters. “To have a degree, and to have some education back then, would have been extremely helpful. So for me it is really important for them to get that education, get that degree,” she said.

Now, Spizzo will be celebrating alongside her girls this graduation season. As Spizzo accepts her nursing degree, Kate will graduate from Immaculate Heart Academy with plans to head to Michigan State University, Bethy will graduate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Courtney will celebrate her second wedding anniversary.

Some people have asked why she went back to college later in life. 

“This is a real calling for me, and I have so much inside of me left to share,” she said. “I have given my daughters wings to fly, and now it’s my turn. I am going to send them out into the world to do their thing, and it’s time for me to do mine too.” 

Left to right: Lolo, Kate, Tiffany, Courtney, TJ and Bethy