Unwavering Commitment
Salinas, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC, (Nursing ’21) grew up in Edinburg, Texas, the son of Mexican immigrants. His father, Alfredo Salinas, worked in a fruit and vegetable packing shed, and in the summers, he would drive the family 12 hours north to Memphis, Texas, to work the cotton fields. Young Aaron spent every summer of his childhood pulling weeds in the hot Texas sun.
The experience instilled in Salinas a work ethic that served him well. He overcame his hardscrabble upbringing to earn multiple degrees and certifications, become a paramedic and a nurse practitioner, teach at a university, earn a leadership role in his profession and his community and win a fistful of achievement awards.
“It would have been difficult for somebody without his drive to get through and do as well as Aaron did,” said his former advisor, Kellie Bruce PhD, RN, who is a TTUHSC associate professor and program director of the Family Nurse Practitioner track. “But he was used to hard work. He was used to doing what it took to get it done.”
“I had to grow up and be a man,” Salinas recalls.
That meant Salinas and his older brother had to work to help support their mother and two younger brothers. Salinas earned $280 a month by participating in a work/school program for migrant families; then, as soon as he turned 16, he took on a full-time job in telemarketing for the Texas State Troopers Association, while still attending high school.
He hated the telemarketing job — mostly, he admits, because he had to wear a tie — and later took a job with an ambulance company owned by a friend’s father. He did office work at first, then became an ambulance driver, and eventually earned his certification as an EMT-basic. He never envisioned a career in health care, but transporting patients put Salinas in contact with hospital staff and other health care workers, and he was intrigued. Health care would give him a way to serve the South Texas community he loved.
Salinas decided to study for a bachelor’s degree in nursing, and — in another demonstration of his dedication — simultaneously trained to be a paramedic. “Long story short, I got accepted into both programs at the same time,” he explained. He attended nursing classes at the former University of Texas-Pan American every weekday, went to paramedic training two evenings a week and worked a 36-hour shift at a private emergency medical services company on the weekends.
“I didn’t apply anywhere else,” he says.
He was accepted into the School of Nursing Post-Graduate Family Nurse Practitioner Certificate program, and says it changed his life. “They took a chance on me,” he says. “I hadn’t been the best student — my undergraduate grades weren’t the greatest. I was focused on supporting my mother and my brothers.”
Salinas finished that program and added a rural health certificate in nursing, then went on to earn his Doctor of Nursing Practice from TTUHSC as well.
Along the way, he worked as a paramedic for more than 10 years and as an emergency room nurse at Valley Baptist Health System in Harlingen, Texas for five. Since 2015, he’s been on the faculty at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in his hometown of Edinburg, where he teaches nursing classes, serves as program coordinator for the Bachelor of Science in Nursing program, and cares for patients in the university’s health center. He also sees pediatric patients in private practice.
Salinas has presented at the annual meeting of the American College Health Association, and in 2025, he will be the program chair.
He has received a number of awards: the Texas Nurse Practitioners’ Rising Star Award, as well as inclusion among the 25 Outstanding Texas Nurses by the Texas Nurses Association and the National Emergency Nurses Association’s “20 under 40” list, among other honors. In 2023, the TTUHSC School of Nursing presented him with its Distinguished Alumni Award for Community Advocacy.
Salinas is proud of those honors but is more focused on two overall goals. One is to serve the region where he grew up — the Rio Grande Valley, where the poverty rate is more than 25%, among the highest in the nation, and its people have limited access to health care. The other is simply to inspire others, especially young people, by the story of how far he has come.
“I just want to show by my example,” he said, “that anything is possible.”