Professional Development Plan Nursing is a profession of care and respect for human dignity, which is the core value I strive to maintain throughout my career. My main goal now while in school at Walden University is to complete the MSN-Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) program. Advocacy is the consequence of the respect required of a nurse and the mission and vision of Walden University; I have been given the ability to understand healthcare from the patient's perspective and the range of socio-cultural factors that influence their decisions. I have acquired the knowledge to evaluate how each individual interacts and relates to others, families and communities within an ever-changing society. As a nurse and change agent, it is mine. It is because of this deficiency that I feel all nurses should have the opportunity to give back to the field of nursing through education. After leaving West Africa and coming to the United States, I enrolled in nursing school part-time while working as a nurse for financial reasons. Nursing is a passion for me; the second semester was hard for me especially with family and I was seven months pregnant so I dropped out of school. After the birth of my first child, it was not possible to go back to where I started due to the sequence of the nursing program, so I changed my major to Nutrition/Dietetics. Education was instilled in me at an early age, neither of my parents attended college; I am the first person in my family to complete higher education. The pressure to continue studying and succeed has always been there and is probably why I am who I am today. I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in May 1987, lo and behold I went back to school and challenged the nursing board in my second year of the program (BSN) with all my West African and US nursing school transcripts, surprisingly I passed the board in However, I still felt incomplete due to lack of evidence-based knowledge as an advanced practice nurse practitioner and returning to Walden University is the best thing for my MSN to achieve my goal of serving the poor and underserved community. My return to Walden University will assist me in problem solving and research development, it will also provide me with the opportunity to perfect the APA format necessary for an academic writer. Walden's mission, vision statements, and social change vision state that "Walden University supports positive social change through the development of principled, competent, and ethical scholarly professionals who are and will become civic and professional role models by promoting the betterment of society by helping to educate the nurses of tomorrow” (Walden University,