Staff Photo by Lesley Onstott
Jasminka Skrgic, a nurse intern, explains Dolly Jolly's discharge instructions to her as she prepares to leave Memorial Hospital on Friday. Skrgic, who left Bosnia to come to the United States more than 10 years ago, saved her money and studied English in hopes of becoming a nurse.

Jasminka Skrgic was 18 and her family wanted her to get married and have children, like good Muslim girls in Bosnia were supposed to do.

But she was determined to get a higher education.

"When I graduated from high school, I told my father I was going to go to college and support myself," said the now 41-year-old Ms. Skrgic, a recent nursing graduate from Chattanooga State Technical Community College.

After her mother, a Catholic from Croatia, supported her decision, her father didn't have much of an option but to go along with it, she said.

Now, more than 20 years after she received an engineering degree in food and biotechnology and escaped the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, Ms. Skrgic graduated with a 4.0 GPA from the nursing program. She is working as a nurse intern at Memorial Hospital until she passes the state board exam, which she will take this week.

During her years at Chattanooga State, she received several honors, including the 2009 Nursing Excellence Award.

Ms. Skrgic didn't know she wanted to be a nurse until her professors at Chattanooga State -- where she was taking classes such as English, nutrition and microbiology -- made the suggestion, she said.

"Jasminka was truly the ideal nursing student," said Cynthia Swafford, director of the nursing program at Chattanooga State. "She was a dedicated, highly motivated student, always wanting to learn more and understand the 'whys' of nursing."

But the road to success has been anything but easy.

In 1991, after graduating from college in Croatia, she returned to Bosnia but was unable to get her diploma because the borders were closed because of a war in which several hundred thousand people were killed.

For six years in Bosnia, her life was surrounded by a civil conflict in the former Yugoslavia, watching as her brothers and father were shuffled in and out of prison because they refused to fight. At one time, the family survived on apples for an entire week.

"Here in America, people say there's no democracy, (but they can even) make jokes about the president," she said. "If I did that in Bosnia, next morning I'm dead. I'm somewhere floating in the river."

She arrived in Chattanooga in 1997 with one bag and $10 in her pocket, without knowing any English or whether her brother, whom she hadn't seen in four years, would meet her at the airport. Her brother came to Chattanooga earlier as a refugee and petitioned for her and another brother, who was in a refugee camp in Austria, to be able to follow him.

Her parents and younger brother remain in Bosnia, she said.

In the past decade, she's held different positions, including minimum-wage jobs at a restaurant and in production lines at two factories. But she managed to climb the ladder fairly quickly at the factories and, while she was working at McKee Baking Co., she also was taking classes at Chattanooga State.

"(Studying and working) was very hard, very stressful," she said. "English is my third language, so I'm not as fast as some people. I realized I couldn't work full-time and study, so I went to part-time and then I got a scholarship in school where they covered my expenses and I had to work for them, so I had to quit my job at McKee."

Marie Waldon, her supervisor at Memorial Hospital, said Ms. Skrgic has an outgoing personality who is willing to work hard.

"She is very receptive to learning and picking up the skills and knowledge that she's going to need to be an excellent nurse here," Ms. Waldo said.

Now that Ms. Skrgic finished her schooling, she said she would like to work eventually with the Bosnian community.

"I'm bilingual, and I'm hoping to help not just everybody but Bosnians; that's my roots," she said.