Assistant professor Edy Zepeda graduated from Boise State’s on-campus nursing program over ten years ago. His voice radiates pride and gratitude when he talks about the education he received.
“I walked into here feeling immense gratitude,” he said. “I thought that Boise State was taking a shot on me, and I did not want to prove them wrong. So I came motivated.”
Zepeda dove into the university experience: he started study groups, attended sporting events, repped Bronco merch.
“I tried to do as many volunteer things as possible to give back,” he said. “Because – I tell my students this all the time – I feel like nursing has just made me a better person. It’s made me a better father, a better husband, a better neighbor, a better friend, and I owe that all to my alma mater. I feel like that’s where I learned everything.
“And how can you not have immense gratitude over something that shaped the rest of your life, essentially?”
His route to Boise State
Zepeda’s journey from Boise State student to faculty began while he and his wife were looking for somewhere to settle their family. Zepeda has lived all across the United States, from California to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. He discovered Idaho from a friend who had lived in Boise in the early 2000s and encouraged Zepeda to check out the city.
Serendipitously, “I just happened to watch Boise State play in the famous Fiesta Bowl against Oklahoma,” he said. The blue turf intrigued him and brought to mind his friend’s advice.
Boise State’s high-quality student support sealed the deal: when Zepeda emailed several universities to ask about their nursing schools, one of the only representatives to answer him was from Boise State.
“She was very honest with me, very welcoming,” he said. “She was wonderful, and I said, ‘If the representative, if the guidance counselor so to speak, is this nice, I can’t imagine what the instructors are like.'”
He applied to Boise State, and soon his family was moving to Idaho. “We just instantly loved it,” he said.
Discovering teaching in nursing
Zepeda absolutely loves teaching. His first dream was actually to become a high school math teacher, but once he started pursuing nursing, he didn’t really think much about teaching. He says professor Kelley Connor planted the seed in his mind, again.
Connor taught Zepeda’s mother-baby nursing class and she noticed his natural and engaging presentation style. When she asked if he had ever considered teaching, “he didn’t seem very interested in being a nursing instructor,” she said.
Yet Connor saw something in Zepeda he hadn’t fully realized himself. When Zepeda graduated in 2015 and started working, “sure enough, the opportunity to teach a student came naturally,” he said.
“Today, I am thrilled to call him a colleague in the School of Nursing,” Connor said. “He brings that same excellent presentation style to his students, and it has been such a joy to watch him grow into the gifted nurse and educator he is today.”
Zepeda specifically asked to be paired with nursing students in his hospital unit, and he quickly discovered he loved teaching students in clinical settings.
“It all just started feeling more natural,” Zepeda said. “I love nursing and I love teaching, so why not combine the two?”
Zepeda went on to pursue a master’s degree in nursing education, which allowed him to keep working at the bedside and maintain his teaching roles. It was around that time in 2017 when he started adjuncting for Boise State, too.
A pit stop and the path back home
In 2020, he graduated again and accepted a teaching position in Pennsylvania. But when COVID swept the nation, Zepeda’s teaching job fell through. Students weren’t allowed to be in clinicals, so he accepted a bedside position at a large hospital. He gained experience in a trauma center, the cardiothoracic ICU, a neuro ICU, and a special pathogens ICU (“which was basically covid,” he said) that was also partnered with an oncology unit.
“I always tell my students that I did really try to diversify my nursing portfolio, because I wanted to come back and teach,” he said.
As the pandemic subsided, Zepeda accepted a part-time job at the school he was supposed to teach at in 2020. But he wasn’t ready to step away from his full-time bedside position. So he did both.
“I didn’t want to lose my teaching drive or my possibility to become faculty there, so I taught,” he said. “So really, 2021 and 2022 were just a blur. I remember having, like, one day off a week for like 10 months.”
Zepeda loved his work, but the grueling pace of two jobs was wearing him down. He knew it was time for a change, for him and his family. That’s when one of his past instructors from Boise State texted him.
“She said, ‘I don’t know where you’re at in life, but just so you know, we’re hiring three faculty members,'” Zepeda recalls. “We did miss Idaho. I mean, it really became home for us after I graduated. And I said, ‘Why not? It doesn’t hurt to apply.'”
Coming full-circle into the classroom
“Things didn’t work out back in Pennsylvania, but it was sort of like a pit stop to become a better instructor,” Zepeda said. “I was so excited to come back.”
Before he started teaching, the pre-license program director at the time, associate professor Angie Phillips, asked Zepeda what class he wanted to teach. Rooted in memories from his days as a student, the answer came so easily: med-surg.
Zepeda studied medical-surgical nursing under Eldon Walker and can still picture the very row and seat he occupied in the classroom.
“He taught us heart failure, and he taught us the VATS complications between left-sided versus right-sided heart failure, and I just remember sitting back and saying, ‘Eldon is so smart, I can’t believe he just remembers this on the top of his head,'” Zepeda said. “I remember saying, ‘I’m going to come back and teach this class. I’m going to have a nursing career that allows me to teach the way he’s teaching us.’ And when Angie asked me that, I said, ‘Without a doubt,’ I said, ‘I want to teach med surg.'”
It was a full-circle moment for Zepeda.
“I just knew that I was supposed to be back here,” he said. “I’m just really grateful, really happy to be back here at my alma mater and teaching the class that pretty much made me into a nurse.”
Taking pride in his work and his students
Now with the perspective of a faculty member, Zepeda takes his job seriously. He’s motivated to pass on the same quality education he received.
“What’s really refreshing is knowing that not only are the students putting their best foot forward, but so are we,” Zepeda said. “I go into Sarah Llewellyn’s office, and she has 20 projects at the same time that she’s doing to either make her classes better or to put Boise State on a larger map. I talk to Veronica [McDuffee] late at night, and she’s still reviewing things, we’re talking about things that would be beneficial to students.”
“Edy has such a passion for teaching and students can tell how much he cares about their success,” Llewellyn said.
McDuffee agrees – Zepeda’s dedication to student success is what truly stands out.
“He consistently goes above and beyond to ensure students excel, always anchoring his lectures in real-world bedside care,” McDuffee said. “Plus, as an alum, his school spirit is unmatched – he truly “bleeds blue and orange,” and his love for this institution is evident every time he speaks.”
Zepeda is encouraged and humbled when he bumps into former students working in the field. He takes pride in seeing how far they’ve come, knowing his labor of love helped get them there.
“I see some of them wear a Boise State pin on their badge, and that just means a lot to me as well, that they thought they had a quality education,” he said. “Those nights that we put in where we’re trying to top off our lectures or working on a redesign of a course, that means the world that they appreciated everything that we did.”
Teaching for the sake of Idaho
For Zepeda – who describes the culture of the School of Nursing as a “family unit” – teaching is about more than just training critical-thinking nurses.
“We see them, yes, as students, but we also see them as colleagues,” he said. “They’re going to be the ones who call me, or I call them, or we give each other reports on a patient that we’re sharing.”
“He challenges them to do their best not just for a grade, but because he understands the profound impact they will have on future patients,” McDuffee said.
“I think because Boise State is so embedded as part of this community, I guess you could say that we’re also looking to make community members who are secret first responders, who are going to give back to our community somehow, who are going to be the ideal Idahoan,” Zepeda said. “There’s just something special here, so we’re trying to make fantastic alumni who are going to try to give back eventually.”
One way he empowers students to do so is through Stop the Bleed.
Stop the Bleed trains bystanders to help in a bleeding emergency before medical professionals arrive. With Zepeda’s help, students in SNA launched Boise State’s chapter in fall 2024. They now have 15 certified instructors and have trained 80 community members.
“Nursing is so deep, it’s so humane,” Zepeda said. “There’s so many ethics that are involved in it…It just makes our profession so different, that I think it would be hard for a student to be in this program and not feel more civil about the community.”