Looking for advice/suggestions

It's going to be hard to get a position that offers you "relevant nursing experience" at this stage of your nursing education. Most employers know that once you're done with your nursing education within a year that you are going to leave that position and they'll be right back where they are started again with that same vacancy at that position. A lot of an employer's money is invested at the start of an employee's career due to training and having a new employee shadow another veteran employee. At this beginning stage the employer is required to pay you to learn without anything in return from you. That employer is very careful to make sure that the new employee is more than likely to stay with them for the long haul so that the company's initial investment of time and training that's gone into that employee is not wasted on someone who is just going to be there for a year and simply move on.

Your needs and wants in an employer in order to gain relevant nursing experience is at odds with what employers' needs and wants are, an employee that is willing to stay for the long haul so that training, shadowing and staffing gap $ is not being spent every year or every other year on people that stay only for a short time. At this point it comes down to which hospital is in such a desparate staffing situation where they would be willing to hire you even if it's only for a year or so. This is a situation where you'll find a lot of tough work environments because a place that is willing to hire you knowing that you'll leave in a year or so is just looking for a warm body in that ever vacant position as a stop gap measure just to stem the bleeding, so to speak, of having to pay it's current staff time and a half overtime to cover the shifts.

Why not just wait until you're at least 3 months away from graduating nursing school + passing NCLEX and look for an actual graduate nursing position instead of something similar now one year away? You'll get a position much easier because employers then know that you'll be invested in possibly staying with them for the long term in that capacity.

What might be a more productive current endeavor for you right now is to gather employers names and human resource person's info off of newspaper ads and Careerbuilder/Indeed/SimplyHired and ready a list of places that you plan to send resume/complete applications to once you're really close to graduating and passing NCLEX.

Hope this helps.

xeno, I sincerely appreciate your honesty. This make me feel like I have some type of an explanation for why this is so difficult. Some people advise student nurses to find something, anything, immediately to get any type of health care experience. This is what I was trying to do. I definitely did not plan on going in thinking they owe me anything...when I said relevant I meant relevant in terms of working with patients or in heath care, versus irrelevant such as what I used to do (marketing). Your perspective helps me see why they're less apt to hire a student. I thought that they would want to retain people and wouldn't mind you working your way up (my plan) but I guess they have no idea what your plans are. Students could come in and very well take off for another hospital in a year. It seems like I'll have to return to what I used to do for the interim and find a job when I graduate if I don't find anything soon.

I appreciate your perspective on this, it makes me see another side I hadn't considered. Especially the idea that those who will take you, just want a warm body and what type of environment that will be. It's a shame because I did think they would want to work with students, so that they could grow there but they probably don't anticipate that happening. Interesting take, thanks for responding!

Six of my friends who graduated in Dec have been hired. All of them were SNA's. Everyone else, not so lucky! I'm not sure what you're looking for if you are already a SNA? What is your definition of an SN? I've been an SNA for 15mo and have a great shot at getting a job on the floor I work on and or on a any floor in the hospital. So again, I'm not what kind of job hunting you're doing if you already work in a hospital?

Hi Matt,Around here most student positions are listed as Student Nurse Technician, however some PCA positions will say that they accept student nurse's with a certain amount of clinical experience. No, I don't work at a hospital right now. I quite working in Marketing to go back to school and now that I have clinical experience I am trying to get a hospital job. I've been trying to get a job in any capacity in a hospital, obviously Student Nurse Technician would begreat but I really am willing to do anything.

Yale has Student Nurse Interns. have you looked at that? Become a ER Tech, it's a great and fun job. What hospitals have you looked at?

Yeah I applied probably around 5 times in the past 3 or 4 months, never heard back! I've applied to Griffin (they've only had one position), St. Vincent's, Yale and one at Bridgeport Hospital. I've applied to student nurse positions and any PCT's that said students were allowed to apply. I would love to be an ER Tech!