Did you wait to pick up OT?

Hey! I am an ICU new grad too but still have another month of orientation. I plan on picking up extra shifts for OT immediately! I feel like it will help me learn quicker....and I can also understand the feeling of being new and overwhelmed.

We have a lot of dudes leaving for anesthesia school this summer so there are lots of shifts and the OT rate is nice. (:

I didn't wait. I had 90 hours on my first check as a LPN when I first started. Orientation was 3 days and I worked OT right after that .

My first solo shift off orientation was a bonus (OT+) shift, haha. I was scared but I look at extra shifts as additional exposure to the aspects of my job that freak me out the most--I've only been off orientation for about a month.

I don't overdo it, though. My unit is having kinda critical staffing and scheduling issues so I could work almost every day if I wanted. While the money would be great, I acknowledge that I need days off to recharge and tend to the non-nursing parts of my life.

I worked a ton of OT right away and it helped me to get comfortable on the unit much sooner than the others I started with.

I started out in med-surg and remember my unit had a lot of OT available but felt nervous about picking up extra time. I think about 3 to 4 months after I got off orientation I started to pick up OT, and then I did a lot of it!

I picked up a ton of OT as soon as I could. If you want to do it, just do it. The more you work, the more you will learn and get in your groove and start to feel comfortable.

I started cranking out overtime as soon as I was off orientation as a new grad. I got tons more exposure to new things and I feel like it helped me learn faster.

Just don't burn yourself out!

I graduated in the Stone Age. We had six month orientations because that's how long it took after you graduated to have your license. We then worked day shifts exclusively for a year with NO OT. Nursing is a career, and with the B.S. book centric training with limited clinical experience, I tell new nurses that the first year it is OK to question what you have learned and feel incompetent, you need about 3 years to feel comfortable. Today, there are nurses with 1 year experience orienting new nurses. The hardest part of being new now is you show up on the floor with that license in your hand; the employer wants to get you independent quickly.

6 months. I wanted to ensure I wasn't slowing down my coworkers with questions. I also didn't want to burn myself out. I picked up mad OT for a while, and then realized how caustic the work environment was and quit. . It's easy to be money hungry early on, but you don't want it to ruin your experience.

I waited, but that's just me. I was too much in my own head and worried that each overtime shift was another chance I'd have to do something wrong Also, because I was thinking that way, it taxed me even more mentally and therefore, made me feel more tired physically than I maybe was. Only you know what you can handle. xo