Susan Apold ’79 - A Leader in Nursing Education
Throughout her life, Dr. Apold has been dedicated to the nursing profession and nursing education.
“I think that more than 40 years after I graduated that I still hold Holy Family responsible for my career is really important, and I made lifelong friends there,” says Susan Apold ’79, Ph.D., RN, AGNP, ANP-BC, FAAN, FAANP, dean of the School of Nursing at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx, NY. “That’s pretty impressive!"
Throughout her life, Dr. Apold has been dedicated to the nursing profession and nursing education. She has had an impressive career as both a practitioner and an educator, including as a clinical professor of Nursing at New York University’s Rory Meyers College of Nursing and as the founding director of Iona College’s Bachelor of Science degree program in nursing, before returning to Mount Saint Vincent in 2021, where she previously served in several leadership roles, including vice president of Academic Affairs and dean of faculty. In addition, Dr. Apold has maintained a clinical practice in New Rochelle, NY for over two decades. She has received numerous honors in her field, including being honored as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing (the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a registered nurse) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners.
Dr. Apold was inspired to go into nursing by her family. Her great-aunt was a nurse in the Army Air Corps during World War II and one of the first nurses inducted into the U.S. Air Force. She also has a cousin who was a nurse who influenced her desire to pursue nursing. “I don’t ever remember not wanting to be a nurse,” remembers Apold.
A 1975 graduate of Little Flower Catholic High School for Girls in Philadelphia, Dr. Apold received a full scholarship to attend Holy Family College. Her education at Holy Family left a considerable impression on her. “I loved Holy Family,” shares Dr. Apold. “It was a wonderful experience. I had some of the most amazing professors. I don’t know where I could have gone to get a better education. Sister Maureen McGarrity taught Anatomy and Physiology, and I think about her a lot when I teach. I use a lot of the strategies that she used to teach. Her main strategy was talking at 120 miles per hour!”
Dr. Apold attended Holy Family when the then-new Nursing Education Building opened in 1977, and she recalls her classes with many first-rate professors dedicated to nursing. “As for my nursing professors, each one was even better than the next,” she says.
In addition to the many valuable lessons about nursing that she learned in the classroom at Holy Family, Dr. Apold also learned the importance of membership in nursing organizations. She has twice served as the president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners as well as the president of the Nurse Practitioner Association New York State, and the founder and project director of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners Leadership Development Program.
“When I was at Holy Family the dean of the School of Nursing, Dr. Alice Phillips, taught a research course and she spoke about nurses needing to have a voice and joining organizations. I was president of the Student Nurses Association at Holy Family, so being a leader and using your voice was always presented to all of us as the best way to advance our careers. I was not out of school for six months before I joined the Legislative Committee of the Pennsylvania Nurses Association, and I've been joining nursing associations ever since. I think it’s an essential and moral responsibility if we have accepted the responsibility to be a nurse. If we embrace the Nursing’s Social Policy Statement, which says that we are going to take care of people, I think we need to collectively use our voices to advance the profession."
In 2008, Dr. Apold took on the challenging task of establishing the new School of Health Science and Nursing at Concordia College in New York. Though it took immense effort, Dr. Apold counts it as one of her proudest accomplishments. “It was the heaviest lift that I had ever done in education,” she explains. “It was my biggest responsibility and required interfacing with state and federal authorities and recruiting students. From its inception in 2007, until the college closed in 2021, it was one of the top 10 nursing programs in terms of NCLEX scores in New York. I am really proud of that.”
Reflecting on her decades in nursing education, Dr. Apold has realized the significant impact that she had on her students. “It occurs to me as an educator I have prepared a few thousand nurses in my lifetime,” she states. “That’s a whole lot of people I have touched in one way or another. Every time a nurse whom I have educated graduates, that nurse may have touched thousands of lives. I think teaching people how to be nurses the way I believe nurses should be is my proudest accomplishment.”