Wesley, Barbara, Wes and Elsie Miner at their home in Des Plaines, Ill., 1957.
Imparting survival skills By the time Scheffer reached high school, her uncle had moved the family to southeast Michigan. Always driven to succeed, Scheffer began considering potential careers. “I had to write a high school paper about a career
choice, and my aunt told me to write about nursing,” Scheffer says. “An aptitude test suggested I should become a medical technologist, but I thought that would be boring. I entered the University of Michigan as an industrial design major. After a short time, I thought it would be hard to find a job in that field, so I fell back on nursing. I wanted to enter a field in which I could be employed after graduating. It had little to do with my experience as a hospital patient.” Scheffer earned her nursing degree and developed a special interest in mental and community health. After becoming a registered nurse and working for several years as a staff nurse with University of Michigan Hospitals and the Washtenaw County Health Department, she and noted psychiatric/mental health nurse Marie-Luise Friedemann launched Counseling for Coping, a private practice they ran for 10 years. Scheffer also joined Eastern as an instructor in the Department of Nursing. “I enjoyed working with people who need help
coping with different issues and don’t have access to many resources,” Scheffer says. “I wanted to teach people how to become resilient and how to help themselves—how to cope, manage and survive.” Besides helping her clients and inspiring legions of EMU nursing students to provide excellent care to the community and to people with mental illness, Scheffer earned a master’s in psychiatric nursing from Michigan, then a doctorate in Educational Leadership from Eastern. She helped create EMU’s Educational Studies- Nursing Education doctoral program and co-wrote two books that received prestigious awards from the “American Journal of Nursing.” She progressed to full
26 Eastern | SPRING 2014
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