Internship choices for future ICU (advise needed)

[Purlple]

I'm on my last year of school and applied to ICU internship (with potential employment) within one large teaching hospital. There are more people applied than the number of open spots. So, I may not get it. In a meantime I have to pick my second choice. Eventually, I would like to work in ICU. What should I choose as my second choice for the internship: Emergency, PACU, MedSurg? or should I apply to very small ICU in a small non-teaching hospital?

I had my clinicals in all these departments. The one thing I noticed that I liked my day if I worked in friendly nursing/doctors environment (any department). It could be the same dept but my day was totally different depending with whom I worked. I loved Emergency when I was working with awesome nurse. The next day I was working with a nurse who had "Leave me alone attitude" and my day was awful. I came home with a thought "may be emergency is not for me". I know I think about the whole specialty based on people I worked with that day and this is not right, but I'm aware of it. Ok... I'm going away from my main question.

Any advises about the second choice for future ICU?

Thank you

[bluesky, BSN, RN]

Well, here's what I would do. If you want surgical ICU, I'd go for PACU. If you want medical ICU I'd go for Med/Surg. If you want to be more well rounded, go for ER. You will find many threads on this forum about how ER and ICU thinking are very different. You may want to either broaden your horizons and develop a wider skill set with ER (this may cause growing pains in ICU in a couple of years though) or get a basic foundation in PACU or med/surg. If you want to do SICU, I really advise PACU instead of surgical floor because that will get you used to the pt crashing on you syndrome! I haven't been a SICU RN for too long but I used to work in an ER as a unit secretary before nursing school and it has taken some serious effort to reprogram myself. I feel that my peers who just started from the Med/Surg or critical care perspective from the gitgo are more well-adjusted than I am. But honestly, that's just my own experience- you may have a completely different one.