Is being a student a disadvantage when getting a job?

[kirish34]

I have an interview next week for a gn position and I will be starting grad school part time in the fall. I'm nervous about telling the employer that I will be starting classes and that I will not be able to work probably two days out of the week. The job is in a related field of my MSN program and the hospital and school are affiliated. I feel bad that I'm coming into the interview already with limitations of when I can work in several months. Do you think this hurts my chance of getting the job? Any advice on how to approach the situation? Thanks for your input!

[caliotter3]

This is a tricky situation. You don't want to spoil your chances, yet sometime you have to tell them. It is always best to be honest. I would wait until I got on the floor and then discuss this with your manager. It seems like you are not being forthright, but you are getting the job, and then are giving them the opportunity to work with you or the other way around. At that time you need to decide which is more important if your manager can not arrange your schedule for you. Really, I don't see why he/she would not want to help you in this respect. And as far as being a student, in one instance, it helped me to get a job. I was hired because I was going to school to be an RN. The DON felt she was getting a new RN for the price of an LVN and it would not be long to reap the benefits.

[ukstudent]

It may or may not hurt you.

As a general rule -

Big teaching hospitals are used to being used for experience and actively encourage nurses to further their education.

Smaller community hospitals have less money to spend training a nurse that is in effect telling them that they have no intention of being a staff nurse more than a few years. They might shy away from you.

I will ask why are you going to grad school so soon. I had a few friends that tried to start school along with starting jobs as new nurses. The stress of learning to be a nurses was bad enough, when they added school on top of it they had problems. Both the job and their GPA suffered. If possible I would recommend having at least 6 months nursing experience before adding another stress. Please read some of the posts from the first year of nursing forum.