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She graduated from Yale after raising 3 kids. Her son was her classmate.

Vanessa Landegger, 50, graduated last week from the same nursing program where her son is a first-year student.

By
May 27, 2024 at 1:19 p.m. EDT
Vanessa Landegger with her son, Dylan Antonioli. The two were classmates at the Yale School of Nursing until Landegger graduated on May 20. (LLG and Dylan Antonioli/Dylan Antonioli)
6 min

Vanessa Landegger had long dreamed of working in medicine.

She enrolled in courses as a first-year medical student in Colorado in 2000, but soon found herself struggling to balance classes with raising her then 8-month-old son. She was away from extended family, sleep was hard to come by and her medical school’s facilities didn’t have accommodations for nursing mothers, she said.