nursing student needing advice

BarbPick · Oct 18, 2003

Do yourself a big favor. Learn how to manage your time in adult med surg nursing for a full year. It will be something you can base your whole lifetime around.

Specialize after. My cousin went straight from graduation to post partum. 18 years later, she did not know how to take care of sick patients and failed miserably when her job in post partum phased out. What was so sad, is she believed she could care for everyone, and had to take a nurse refresher course to get another job.

Tiki_Torch · Oct 19, 2003

flw2185,

A lot can be said for getting a little adult med-surg experience, especially if you are not absolutely certain you will always want to be a NICU nurse. Even if you did get a year of adult med-surg and then worked in a NICU for 10+ years, I'd imagine a refresher course might be helpful then too.

It's certainly something to think about as you start your career. I know that if I wanted to work on a med-surg floor right now I'd be almost totally lost. I graduated from nursing school in 1991 and spent 10 months on an adult telemetry floor as a student. It was there that I decided I was nearly sure I didn't want to work with adults all my life. We'd get some medical overflow patients and I just never felt a real connection with them if you know what I mean. Anyway, I spoke with my favorite nursing instructor about this. I too had heard that "Every nurse should get at least 2 years of Med-Surg experience under their belt before they decide to specialize in any area." and I wanted her opinion. I trusted her. If she said I needed the med surg experience, I'd have suffered through it. She told me, "Well, years ago, when nurses were often required to work all over the hospital... emergency room one day, pediatrics the next, and surgical the next... it was very important to have a good med-surg base; however, these days every area, including med-surg, is a specialty in it's own right. I'd rather see you go straight to a Maternal-Child area rigth out of school where you feel sure you'll be happy than to see you force yourself into an area you don't want to be and end up leaving the profession because you are so miserable."

You see, I grew up in the hospital with several surgeries and even had my first 5 birthday's in the hospital. I always wanted to be a nurse and work with children since I felt I understood what it was like to be a kid in the hospital. When I graduated there were no positions on Pediatrics so I found myself in the well baby nursery. Our nursery soon combined with postpartum to become a Mother-Baby unit. I loved doing that for 7 years. I got to really recognize healthy babies which made it much easier to spot a sick one quickly, and learned how to help Moms and babies learn to breastfeed, how to take care of adults (all kinds of people become pregnant you know... ones with asthma, kidney stones, broken bones, all shapes and sizes, even some with strokes... med-surg experience would have made learning how to care for these Moms easier, but I made it through and learned a lot from each patient. At the end of 7 years I decided I was ready for a challenge and transferred to the NICU where I found my true love. I know and believe in my heart that my Mother-Baby experience has made me be a much better NICU nurse than I would have been if I had gone straight to the NICU... but that's just ME. There are lots of nurses who went straight to NICU after graduating from school and would never want to go anywhere else.

Having said all this, I can honestly say that from what I've seen, the more experience in many areas and abilities helps tremendously in day-to-day work and when transferring to another job or hospital. Employers seem to really like nurses who can do lots of stuff. I believe that my experience with NICU and Mother-Baby made me a better candidate for a new job when I recently applied for and got one in our local hospital's NICU.

If the NICU where you live near hire's students to work there then by all means see if you can too. If not, the OB/GYN experience is coming in handy already. After all, NICU and OB/GYN are under the Maternal-Child umbrella. You seem to have a good understanding about preceptorships... when you graduate you will be hired somewhere and be paired with one or two preceptors (nurses on the unit who are considered by management to be excellent representatives of the unit and are qualified to teach you the correct way to do things. You'll probably also have some classes to go to that teach you all about baby care or the care of whatever types of patients you'll be caring for.) Most new graduates have an orientation period of like 12-16 weeks. Some hospitals hire new graduates and some don't... it often depends on the staff they have at the time you apply. For instance, they don't want to have too many brand new nurses on one shift because having enough experienced nurses present it incredibly important for patient safety and for assisting/teaching the newer nurses at the same time.

Sorry I wrote so much! I type too fast for my own good!

I don't know about any Louisiana hospitals. I hope someone else will answer your post too for another perspective and for Louisiana information.

Good luck and best wishes for a wonderful nursing life. Visit and question us here on this board anytime!