Grad School Application Essay

Tristar · Jan 4, 2014

Hello,

I am applying to grad schools and was hoping to get some feed back on my essay. I've haven't been able to find any nurses to read it. This is the first time I am writing about where I would like to go with my advanced degree so I would love a bit of advice.

I'm not sure this is the right discussion board to post under. If not, could someone please direct me to the correct one?

Thanks and Happy New Year!

I have been fortunate to have many supportive, loving people in my life who motivate and inspire me. One such person is my mother who raised me as a single parent, made sure I went to college, then went back to school herself and earned her Master's in Health Administration from USC. She has taken on many roles at the community health clinic in Central Los Angeles where she has worked for almost twenty years. She also involved me with the clinic by volunteering my services throughout the years to some of the clinic's programs and events. Having witness her evolution into a leadership role at the clinic has had a great impact on my nursing career.

I graduated from nursing school in June of 2009, right at the end of the Great Recession. New grad jobs were hard to find in many states. In researching job options, I found the Versant RN Residency, a program offered to new grads that provides a didactic curriculum in the preparation of a nurse to the floor. I applied for positions all over the country. I looked for all the residency programs I could but pretty much applied to any hospital taking new grads.

Almost a year after I graduated I was offered a position at Keck Medical Center of USC starting off with a Versant 18 week classroom and clinical training. The program provided me with the skills, education and confidence needed to construct a sustainable, evidence based practice. It also introduced me to advance nurse practice specialties. The hospital at the time was working on having clinical nurse specialists (CNS) assigned to every unit. They were the resident expert on the floor. I could see myself in that role. I love to educate, to share with others what I have learned. In school I remember feeling a duty to share with my cohorts whatever new information I found.

After working acute care for a few years I was having this reoccurring feeling of helplessness in the hospital. My patients were usually those having an exacerbation of a problem with multiple comorbidities. It was distressing to witness the state of these patients knowing that a lot of what I saw could be prevented. Also I was seeing a lack of professional development in the nurse practice environment that I wanted to address. I began looking at nursing roles outside the hospital. In researching a PhD in nursing I found a degree where I could become a nurse leader and scientist creating and disseminating research guiding evidence based practice. In learning about this degree, it helped me to define what kinds of research I wanted to study. My area of concentration in nursing began to focus around nurse development and primary care delivery systems. Primary care is such an underserved specialty; however this is where most of the work needs to be done in order to not have patients with co-morbidities filling up hospital beds.

I am a per diem RN for an outpatient Veterans Administration (VA) clinic in Eureka, Ca. The Patient Aligned Care Team (PACT), VA's patient centered care model, has just recently been implemented here. It is a framework driven model designed to enhance coordination between disciplines, increase patient access to providers and establish continuity of care. My job is to help the care teams keep up in their management of their patient panel. One area of interest I have in PACT is in the managing of care teams. The provider will have 1100 patients on their team and will need to keep track of every abnormal lab, diagnostic, vital sign, etc. I would like to study models like these working on methods of measuring and refining them. Obtaining my PhD will allow me the opportunity to develop leadership skills and gain the clinical expertise needed to work in a variety of complex care settings helping in transforming health care.