QuestGAV

That's how it was for me. At least in CT, if you've completed and passed your first nursing clinical and are still enrolled you are eligible to work as a CNA.

It's one thing to hold students accountable for their actions. It's another thing entirely to do so in a destructive way. In most of these stories, it seems like whatever message the instructor was trying to send was lost because the student fixated on the delivery of the message. Publicly embarrassing other people is not an educational tactic, it's a mean-spirited passive-aggressive way of getting back at all the people who have done that to you in the past.

I'm proud that I'm going to be a nurse. I constantly get experienced nurses, teachers, and patients telling me that more men in nursing is a great thing. I think you have to know and be confident that what you're doing is intensely challenging on both an intellectual and interpersonal level and important on so many levels that you can hardly begin to describe them.

I'm really looking forward to being a nurse, but I do plan on starting a nurse practitioner program in the not-too-distant-future. I'll still be a nurse though, it'd take a lobotomy to get that out of me!

It sounds like you're starting off on a tough floor. There are quite a few things you're going to need to adjust to. That will take time, you can't expect it to happen all at once. Colleagues sometimes (always?) forget that they were new too once and expect you to do everything just as they would do it. Also - just because you don't have a preceptor anymore doesn't mean you have to feel like you're off on an island. You might have some luck running through what you've done and what you expect to do with the other nurses you're working with throughout the night. They might be able to fill in the gaps for things that didn't come to mind immediately for you. Obviously everybody is busy but I think they'll respect you for wanting to be thorough and get things right.

I'm far from an expert, but I think you also have to consider what leaving a two month blank period between the granting of your license and your interview with X-hospital looks like to them, that can raise more difficult questions and make you look dishonest from the outset. I think you're better off being honest with them. Especially if you're now looking for opportunities in a different specialty you have a very good and very simple reason for leaving the environment you just left.

One of the great experiences I have had as a student nurse is working with a hospice home care unit for my community nursing rotation. This amazing group of professionals (including nurses, social workers, spiritual counselors, and expressive arts therapists) has taught me a tremendous amount about helping patients and their families live the end of their lives well. The most important lesson I've taken from them is that the dying process is part of living - and patients have the right to live that part of life with dignity and as free of pain as possible.

I guess I'll use this post to introduce myself to this gigantic community. I had been going to a good private school studying computer science when I came to the realization that while the profession was challenging, it wasn't particularly interesting. I drifted around a bit, unsure of how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. I moved in with my girlfriend and started working with her doing registration at the ER she worked at. I found myself consistently amazed and inspired by the nurses I worked with. The nurses there showed me that there's a depth to nursing that people outside of the profession could never understand. Nursing combines the problem-solving and critical thinking activities that I enjoyed in computer science with a deep interpersonal dynamic that just doesn't exist anywhere else. Three years later, I'm married to that girl and scheduled to earn my BSN this spring. Nursing school has been accompanied by trials and tribulations, of course, but I now couldn't imagine myself being anything other than a nurse. I love what we do, how we approach our problems, and our shared values as a profession. I can't wait to get out there and practice on my own.