For Erin McCullough, the road to becoming a nurse hasn't always been easy.
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She is a mother-of-four and wife first and foremost, but for the past four years she has also juggled university studies.
Mrs McCullough is among the newest cohort of 49 nursing and midwifery graduates who started this week - the largest the health service has ever employed.
Fittingly, this year has been named the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife and on Friday AWH celebrated their incoming employees.
"It has been really hard but there is a lot of relief that I am finally here," Mrs McCullough said.
"I have four kids so to be able to be flexible with my study was really great at Charles Sturt.
"When I first started my husband and I would only really see each other when we changed cars when he went off to work after I was studying.
"We were just like ships sailing in the night and that was how we did it for the first two and a bit years of my degree until my mum moved over and we had some help."
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Growing up in Sydney and living in Newcastle for most of his life, Clint Sutton believes the Albury-Wodonga community is what helped him take the leap into nursing.
The only male within the 2020 graduates said he should had done his four year nursing degree "20 years earlier".
"But I am where I want to be now and that is really exciting," he said.
"We have only been here for about seven years but when I started working in theatre I just fell in love with it and I just thought I had to go and do my nursing.
"It has been a long and hard journey, having a family, having to work and do full time study, there just isn't enough hours in the day.
"My background is in transport and when I walked away from that I decided to reinvent myself."
AWH clinical education manager Emma Horsfield said they are excited to be welcoming a wide range of nurses and midwives to the health service.
"It is really important to us to work with the local education partners Charles Sturt University, La Trobe University, Wodonga TAFE and GOTAFE," she said.
"To see so many local nurses come through is something we love, but also have nurses from across the country.