IG-11

Hi phlnurse10, I am glad you're looking into it! It's a great track. First of all, good luck in your ABSN studies. I think you will find it a little more focused and practically applicable than your first bachelor's degree. To answer your question: I strongly encourage you to apply for the scholarship program. It is a low acceptance rate, so make sure you take the time to really develop your personal essays. Also, have an honest conversation with yourself - ensure that working with underserved communities is something you are drawn to personally. That said, there is plenty of opportunity on the other side to get ICU experience. I was able to step directly into a critical care unit at a major area hospital post-graduation, and I did not feel that my Nurse Corps obligations were too limiting. If you are set on being in one specific city, you would likely be frustrated with it. But if your focus is more regional (I.e. you want to live and work on the West Coast, or New England, etc.) then I think you will be happy with your options. The way it works is the HRSA assigns a grade to each facility's primary care, mental health, and dentistry needs. In my year, I believe is was a score of greater than 14 in primary care or mental health that qualified a facility. I would speak to scholarship program staff to investigate how/if that has changed, as this was over 5 years ago. Once you are accepted and complete your education, the program staff are really good at providing guidance that can help you identify facilities that #1 meet the needs of underserved communities while #2 also accomplishing your professional goals. Short version: You can find a job in an ICU immediately post-grad if you are flexible on the specifics, and if you do the standard hard work to get there that any new grad intent on ICU must do. Let me know what you decide, and good luck! I am happy to help answer more questions if they come up.

Hi everybody! I recently got accepted to CRNA school and have been reflecting on my journey. I realized that my path has involved many of the more complicated things that I see people commonly asking about here. I pursued nursing as a second-degree, applied for and was accepted into the Nurse Corps Scholarship Program, fulfilled that service obligation by working in an underserved area in CVICU, and am now accepted into CRNA school and preparing to start my program. I have experience as a CVICU resource nurse and help lead our unit council, and frequently precept new nurses - I care a lot about helping people navigate the often complicated pathway into nursing and now CRNA school. All that to say, if anyone has questions about their own process and needs some guidance, I am happy to offer any clarity I can from my own experiences - we are all in this together. Or, if you would like to share something valuable that you have learned along the way, please feel free!

Looking forward to meeting everyone! I'm hoping that during the November meeting they talked about we can all exchange numbers. It'd be great to get a text chain going while we all prepare for the program. Still feels surreal!

P.S. If your patient can do yoga right now they probably need transfer orders.?

You can absolutely use alternative therapies as a nurse to help your patients. While you should NEVER administer something to your patients that is not explicitly ordered by a provider and processed through your hospital's pharmacy review (I.e. no herbal medicine unless explicitly ordered for your patient), alternative therapies are used every day in the workplace. I work in an ICU with very sick patients, and sometimes one of the best things for their mental health is music therapy, aroma therapy, breathing techniques... In fact, many hospitals have a formalized method for documenting the initiation of these therapies. Especially in the ICU, we are always looking for ways to make our patients more comfortable and more relaxed. If putting some music on or making the room smell better can bring my patient from a RASS of +2 to 0 you bet I'm going to be rocking out with them while we sniff our lavender oils ?

Could not agree more with the sentiment of @GrumpyOldBastard 's post. You got into your program! Congrats. You are educationally ready to enter into this program and be successful. That's what the school is determining with admissions. The BEST thing you can do with your time in the coming months is build a great structure to your life so that when you're settling into a very busy ABSN program, you do not have to worry about what day of the week you prep your meals, or when/where you do your laundry, or how you are going to structure your time between studying, working out, or those (all too evasive) breaks with friends and family. If you feel you still want to prepare even more, buy your textbooks early and read just the first chapter of each one. This is a habit I got into in school - it will familiarize you with the structure and style of your reading that semester and can be hugely helpful in preparing your mind. But at the end of the day, ABSN courses are as much about being proficient in balancing your life, leaning into your support systems, and managing your time as they are about nailing down your study topics. Good luck! You are in for a great learning experience.

Hi all, I am a CVICU nurse who started my career at the beginning of COVID. I was a Nurse Corps Scholarship participant in school and finish my contract next month. I just hit a 6 days off stretch where I will be around the house studying for my CCRN, and figured I would post up here and answer any questions people have about the field, Nurse Corps, CVICU, etc. in my downtime. Ask me anything! - Nurse Nate

Hi @Barbiegirl1229, I saw your post, and as a recent grad who was a nurse corps scholar and just got hired into my first job I wanted to tell you that yes this program is definitely worth it. Way, way better than loans. All you have to pay for school is the taxes off of HRSA's tuition payments, so financially speaking it is certainly better. In response to your inquiry about the type of hospitals/facilities you might be working in, underserved does not equal understaffed. Lots of the facilities serving underserved communities in the U.S. are top tier hospitals with state of the art equipment and good staffing ratios. The one thing I will say is you will likely need to be flexible with the specific city you live in. You should be able to get the state you want (assuming a competitive application, interview, etc.) but if you absolutely have to work in Irvine, CA for instance and would absolutely not want to be in Hemet, CA, then this may not be the best program for you. Hope that helps! Best, Nate

Hi all! My contract was electronically signed on the 14th as well! Honestly so grateful to be part of this program, how cool is this? Just put in a request to join the facebook group.

@robrtsjsara Since CV's and resumes typically include your name and other identifiers already, if you had to forget the ID or SSN on any document I would think that would be the one to do it on. Maybe a minor inconvenience for them, not "ideal", but highly doubt they would disqualify you based on that alone.

Hey guys! Thought I'd chime in as this is a topic I talked to the reps about pretty extensively prior to the application being due. The consensus between the reps, and I spoke to three of them to the point that we were on a first name basis, was that they wanted it formatted like: First Initial, Last Name | Last 4 of SSN | Application ID | Discipline But that they wanted this only at the top of the documents that originate from you (essays, CV/Resume). We are not supposed to be editing official documents from the school or government (i.e. passports, transcripts, etc.) and these will automatically be associated with our account. The only reason for those specs is that they want the essays and CV/Resume to be able to go out to multiple people for review and find their way easily back to your application with no mix-ups. Documents that are not "graded" and are only used for verification purposes don't need this stuff, and you shouldn't be editing official documents anyways. So relax! As long as the organization of your documents demonstrates that you put in work to follow the instructions, and isn't giving them a hard time and effectively encouraging them to disqualify you, you're probably fine. The quality of your work and your vision aligning with theirs are much more important aspects of your application than whether you used ";" or "|" to divide your information.

Hi all! New to the thread but I've been shadowing it for a bit now. I got in! So excited to meet you all. I've got a couple questions about housing in the area since I'll be moving over from Oregon, but I'll post them up to the Facebook page in a bit. This is going to be a blast.

Not at all! I graduated with a degree in Human Biology. I didn't calculate my pre-req GPA, but my overall GPA was mid 3.7's. My TEAS was a 92% "raw" which equates to a 99% national. I work at a hospital in a position that gets a lot of patient contact, and I have a good amount of volunteer experience through stuff like medical missions, etc. Hope that helps!

Hi all! I'm new to this page but wanted to pass along some encouragement just because I know the waiting period is stressful. They are still sending out invites for interviews! I received mine just this morning. I think that the application period has been especially busy this year, so don't count yourself out yet! There's still a shot at an interview í ½í¸‰