Search UT

This past October, as Hurricane Milton bore down on Tampa Bay, Dylan Neel ’22, readied his go-bag to volunteer with the American Red Cross.

Speaking the day before Milton made landfall in Sarasota, Neel projected an air of calm competence; he’s no stranger to caring for those impacted by crises, both natural and man-made.

Neel, a Kentucky native who served six years in the Navy as a linguist specializing in Arabic intelligence, said he was drawn to the nursing program at UTampa because, he said, “I’ve always liked helping people, and there’s just so many different avenues to go down in nursing.” But when he first enrolled, he didn’t realize just how far away some of those roads might lead.

While still in nursing school, Neel worked as a patient care technician with Tampa General Hospital’s geriatric medicine unit. After graduation, he continued as a nurse for older adults. But after about two years, he felt the itch to do something different.

“I always wanted to volunteer,” he said, and when Russia’s aggressions in Ukraine boiled over in 2022, he didn’t think he could do anything. “But after a year or two of nursing experience, I felt like I now have the ability,” he said.

He researched nursing volunteer opportunities in Ukraine and found an organization that coordinates such efforts and signed up for a 10-day session last February. There, he worked with a unit offering primary care for villagers who otherwise wouldn’t have access to health care. The work took him from the capital, Kyiv, to Mykolaiv and beyond as he assisted patients of all ages with all manner of conditions and ailments in several villages across central and southern Ukraine. 

Although he didn’t work on the front lines, the war was never far away. Neel said some of what he witnessed was “pretty gnarly. I was in intelligence, so I kind of knew what to expect from a war-torn country. But some of the things that really struck me were advertisements for military-grade body armor and gear on the subway. That was really shocking to me.”

But he was also deeply moved by the resilience of the people he met and the friends he made, so he returned for a second 10-day stint a couple of months later.

In between those two Ukraine trips, Neel also traveled to Rwanda with an anesthesiologist he met in Ukraine. In Rwanda, he assisted a surgical team treating women with obstetric and gynecological disorders.

“I’ve never done that kind of nursing before,” Neel said, adding, “It was unbelievable. I’m going back in May.”

In the meantime, Neel helped fellow Floridians recover from a devastating hurricane season. He said he looks forward to a full and varied career caring for others around the world.

“My bucket list goal, and one of the actual reasons I became a nurse, was so I could go to Antarctica with the science team there,” he said. “That’s the top of the mountain for me.”