Since high school, Mr. Ulrich knew he was passionate about helping people, medicine and the intricacies of the human body. Going into college, he recalls physical therapy being boring for him, while pre-med was too cutthroat. Thanks to a college elective and a great mentor, he ended up in nursing and fell in love with it.
Due to the oversaturation of nursing schools in Ohio, there were no openings when he graduated. Ulrich found a position in Florida on a stroke rehab floor for one year. Eventually, he came back home for his family. Once he returned to Ohio, he was working in rehab and neurotrauma. He worked in the hospital on the weekends, while being a full-time student on the weekdays to become a teacher. This work schedule was demanding, but worth it for Ulrich. “It was tough – I had to take a master accelerated program… it was intense, they told you, ‘you really shouldn’t work’, but I did.”
He stopped nursing in 2008, after three years of teaching full time, and then as needed on the weekends and full-time in the summer. It got to be a little too much to maintain while raising a family, so he had to “hang up the stethoscope.” The decision to switch from nursing to teaching came from the realization that teaching was something that came to him naturally while being a nurse. “While being a nurse, I loved teaching patients things.” Simultaneously, the burnout from consistent terminally ill patients and high-stress levels also took their toll. “I was always stressed out, it was really intense sometimes, and I was always on edge for those 12 hours, whereas as teaching I’m not so high strung.” Also, he married a teacher, so they would have summers and holidays off at the same time to spend time with the children.
When asked what event stuck with him the most while being a nurse, Ulrich answered, “the patient who almost killed me, hands down, he broke a window out of the hospital on night shift, he was going to bash the door down with a chair, but I was able to talk him down and get him in restraints.” It was the only patient he had ever sent to a psych ward against their will, and his documentation of the event became evidence in court.
The second most memorable event was the moment he knew he was going to become a teacher. It was Christmas Eve, and he was on the neurotrauma floor with eight patients of his own. He was told that some of them were being discharged soon. That was the first time he had written a supervisor note saying he felt it was unsafe, as the patient-to-nurse ratio was unmanageable. “I loved seeing patients go home and get taken care of, but it was getting tough. It was getting harder and harder and the patients were getting sicker and sicker,” he added. “In hindsight, I didn’t deal with Covid, so my hats off to nurses now.”
Ulrich was hired at Hudson High School in 2015 but had interviewed three years prior in 2012 for a physics teaching position. At that time, however, he told the administration that, although he’d love to teach for Hudson, his skill set was in biology and chemistry, especially with his nursing background. Mr. Schmidt ended up in that position. Then, Mrs. Sheldon retired, so Ulrich reapplied and got the position teaching honors biology and honors chemistry his first year. He claims that, “it was meant to be.”
Needless to say, Mr. Ulrich has worked incredibly hard in years past to get to where he is now, but what sets him apart from the other teachers at Hudson High School? Not only can he talk about cases in the hospital, which any teacher can do, but he can also talk about his personal experiences along with his first hand knowledge, which gives him his cutting edge in the classroom.
His ultimate goal in teaching high-level biology at Hudson is to open up the world of medical sciences to students so they can have exposure to a potential interest. On the flip side, students may even discover they want absolutely nothing to do with it. “When they are all in, I really want them to be the best they can.” He wants to help students build academic endurance and strength, especially if they are going into a demanding STEM major in college. “The other thing I love about teaching is seeing where a student is at and knowing that I had a small part in this huge amount of growth, and when students find out they are so much more than they thought they were at the beginning.” Mr. Ulrich ensures students a high school science education that many students aren’t able to receive. Given his experience, grit, natural teaching skills and personability, he pushes students to a potential that was previously unimaginable.
