military relocation and school, yikes!

RNdiva505 · Oct 1, 2011

Do you currently live where family is close by?

damrcngrl95 · Oct 1, 2011

We are a military family and some of the things I have seen my friends forced to do is 1. Try to find out if a school in the state you are PCSing to will accept you into their program and accept the course work that you have completed so far. 2. Stay at your current duty station and graduate at your current college. The military will still move you. 3. Your husband asks to be delayed to the new duty station for up to a year because of your school. Sometimes the Army will allow this if given enough time to change the orders. So you and your husband will need to start working on this now. He can email/call his branch manager and ask for a delay because of your graduation.

I can ask my husband for more ideas, but these are the only ideas that I have seen happen.

Saf1, BSN, MSN, RN, APN, APRN, NP · Oct 1, 2011

I was in almost your exact same situation...my husband wasn't deployed but was sent state-side TDY for 6 months. 5 weeks after he got back from that he PCS'd...while I still had a semester left of nursing school. I spent the entire last year of school caring for our daughter alone. We didn't have family nearby and the military denied any requests for delays in his move. The biggest thing that helped me was having a good friend, also a military spouse, who was a stay-at-home mom and who helped me take care of my daughter during the odd hours of clinicals when the daycare wasn't open. I also appealed to the daycare center and one of the teachers there volunteered to take my daughter home with her in the evenings when I had day shift clinicals that ended after the daycare closed. Of course I paid her, but it wasn't much and it was what we had to do. My school friends were also great. I brought my daughter to meetings for group projects if I couldn't arrange other care and everyone loved to play with her. I'd bring a small DVD player and she'd watch in the student lounge while we worked. Is it hard? Yes. Can it be done? Yes, but it does take a lot of extra planning and coordinating, especially if you're kind of having to make a lot of different childcare scenarios work.

I can't speak for the job market in Hawaii, but I can say it did take me a while to find a job where we moved to. It did happen eventually though, and I'm coming up on my one year anniversary at my first nursing job this week.

Very best of luck...it can be done. :yelclap:

L8RRN · Oct 1, 2011

If you are located at a military post, you probably know other military spouses in your nursing program. My hubby was deployed the last year of nursing school so another girl in the class in the same situation and I made sure we got on different days for clinical and we watched each other's kids while the other was at clinical. It would have been nice to have clinical together but we both decided it was more important to know that our kids were taken care of.

Not sure about job opportunities in Hawaii. A friend PCS'd there but had one year of experience and got on at the military hospital.

Best of luck to you! It can be done!!! And thank your hubby for his service and thank you for yours as a military spouse!!

FLmomof5 · Oct 1, 2011

My hubby was in Afghanistan when I was in NS. I was full-time employed and kids at home. I stayed to complete my education. When I went to find job in the new state, I had no luck initially so I returned to Jacksonville and took my first RN job there. I recently had no other choice but to head to the new state. Luck was on my side.....3 interviews and 2 offers.

As a military wife you have to be fairly resilient and self-sustaining and there are times where the "tough" choice of staying to finish what you started is the better choice in the long run. Only YOU can determine that.

I wish you all the best.