Nursing Program Milestone: First Male Grad At St. Benedict

ST. JOSEPH (WJON News) -- This Saturday is graduation day for the seniors at the College of St. Benedict, and there's one graduate that will definitely be standing out in the crowd.

Chris Dirkes is believed to be the very first male to ever graduate from the all-women's school.

The 2015 Saint John’s University alumnus enrolled to pursue his Doctor of Nursing Practice, Family Nurse Practitioner degree.

He has been working at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester since 2020, and he enrolled in the fall of 2022, making him part of the program’s second cohort.

Dirkes says,

“As a nurse practitioner, you have more ability to affect someone’s care. You’re more involved in the decision-making as far as treatment plans and the type of medications a patient is on.

Ultimately, I wanted to have more of a role in the complexities of all that, so I decided to go back (to school). I’d heard Saint Ben’s had started a new program, and it was a school I’m pretty familiar with. So it seemed like it would be a good fit.”

Since students at CSB and SJU take classes together, Johnnies and Bennies have both long been part of the nursing program at the undergraduate level. But those SJU students still received their degrees from Saint John’s.

Over the years, many women have graduated with master’s degrees from SJU through the Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary.

But since the nursing program is the first graduate program to be established at CSB, no one has yet had the chance to do what Dirkes is about to.

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The program produced its initial graduates in August 2023.

St. Benedict's will hold its ceremony at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday in the Clemens Field House. There are 352 undergraduates and 14 nursing master's and doctoral graduates.

The College of St. Benedict opened in 1913