Just another Student Nurse looking for advice

[perrymann]

Hey there! New member on the forum and I apologize ahead of time if I am posting in the wrong section. I am a senior in my nursing undergrad program and I will graduate in May with my BSN. My longterm goal is to be a Psych DNP and I will hopefully stat school for that within the next 5 years. Upon graduation I would want to work for a year and then do travel nursing for a couple years before settling down. I have a few questions. First of all, if I know that I want to be a pysch NP early on in my career and only work as a psych RN for a few years, do I need to put my time in on a medical floor for the medical and assessment experience like everyone says to do? Second, I have browsed and browsed and I really have not seen too many psych travel positions open anywhere. Would it be in my best interest to work a medical floor so that I could have more opportunities with travel assignments until I start settling back down into pscyh? I really have no interest or desire to work medical floor for long. You would think with the such apparent shortage of psych RNs that there would be more travel jobs posted.

[Sour Lemon]

Hey there! New member on the forum and I apologize ahead of time if I am posting in the wrong section. I am a senior in my nursing undergrad program and I will graduate in May with my BSN. My longterm goal is to be a Psych DNP and I will hopefully stat school for that within the next 5 years. Upon graduation I would want to work for a year and then do travel nursing for a couple years before settling down. I have a few questions. First of all, if I know that I want to be a pysch NP early on in my career and only work as a psych RN for a few years, do I need to put my time in on a medical floor for the medical and assessment experience like everyone says to do? Second, I have browsed and browsed and I really have not seen too many psych travel positions open anywhere. Would it be in my best interest to work a medical floor so that I could have more opportunities with travel assignments until I start settling back down into pscyh? I really have no interest or desire to work medical floor for long. You would think with the such apparent shortage of psych RNs that there would be more travel jobs posted.

You may or may not need to. The psych jobs I applied for fresh out of school requested that I come back after at least one year of med/surg experience. And although psych was my first choice, I'm glad for the six years of medical experience that I ended up getting.

Med/surg is definitely the most available and versatile, from what I've seen. It's a good place to start if you're hoping to travel or move on to almost any other specialty (the exceptions being pediatric specialties and maybe labor and delivery).

You will get plenty of psych patients on most medical floors, by the way. PLENTY.