BartC_RN

Sorry, a little late to topic. It's fast. Very, very fast.

I appreciate this thread. I've been bothered by all of this in my short career so far. A lot of the things y'all are discussing has effected me very deeply. I guess it's cathartic to read everyone's thoughts.

I'm a year and a half graduated and one year this week into my first job and I'm just now starting to feel kind of okay. I have great coworkers on my unit....I'm lucky. I trust probably over 90 percent of them. It seems like, for the most part, we're all the same age and the ones that are older and been doing it longer are the ones that honestly love the job and like teaching the rest of us. Again, I feel fortunate for this. Usually, the only ones that treat you like you're "not in the club" are the ones from other areas that don't know you. I've dreaded getting up in the morning the 4th or 5th day in a row, but once I get moving, doing assessments, etc that goes away. I have honestly yet to dread the work which reinforces my decision to this. Do I feel competent? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. I still ask lots of questions and get aggravated with myself when I miss things that I ought to know. We're so busy I can't think straight sometimes and that bothers me. We've recently started doing something on our unit that makes me feel more like a hospital secretary buried in paper work than an RN. I believe it's something that compromises safety but what do I know, I haven't been around that long. When do I really feel incompetent? During codes when the ICU nurses come over. But overall my life as a nurse is better than it was a year ago.

Usually 6:1 on days with techs/assts and monitor techs. Turnover being what it is, it can easily change to 7:1 or 4:1 or even less on a dime. Max is 8:1 which seems to be pretty rare. It happens but not often. 6:1 or higher doesn't feel very safe to me. It feels like complete chaos most of the time. Needless to say, 12 hours passes VERY quickly. BartC

I graduated in May '09 and just finished my second week on a cardiac med/surg floor....why it took so long to get a job is another story for another thread. I feel like my school prepared me very well to pass NCLEX. Our written tests were horrendous, we lost about half our class over 5 semesters. I guess we had the typical skill checkoffs all other nursing schools have but I'm finding real life skills are a different can of worms which is what everybody always says anyway. So I expected that. I also feel like my program prepared me pretty well to be in possibly a critical care setting where you've got 2 incredibly sick patients you can throw all your thought and effort into. Right now, I'm getting five patients and building towards taking care of 8. So far it's complete chaos. It's completely task oriented at this point with little thought into what's really going on. Where's the time to think about what's going on with patient's when there are so many tasks to accomplish? Luckily we've got a great rapid response team. My last week of school we did this thing called "Clinical Preparation Day" where our instructors put us in a mock situation with "patients" being played by our peers and they threw everything and the kitchen sink at us. It was completely insane and I thought med/surg can't possibly be this wild. But it is. Not everyday, but some days yes. My charge nurse that's orienting me for 6 weeks seems to know what's going on with my patients all the time, so I'm thinking, experience is the thing here. You eventually develop a routine with the tasks to the point you don't have to think about them and can think about patients instead. When does this happen? We shall see. It's chaos but I love it. BartC RN

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I got hired today for the job I wanted before I graduated...pending background check and tox screen. After 5 months of waiting....and doing yard work to survive. I won't go into the whole process and what I've been doing to land a job because I'm sure we're all very well acquainted with that. I will, however, attribute it to persistence with applications and showing my face in HR about once a month. And a lot of praying. So I won't be having to commute or move and I'll be on track to move to critical care at some point which is what I love. Good luck to everybody still looking.

Out of nursing school 5 months tomorrow. Still no job. No bites in over a month. Out of all the hundreds of applications and resumes and cover letters, only 3 interviews so far, and they all felt gratuitous. I went and applied for an LTC job today. In the job description it says for RNs "3 years experience required." But I applied anyway. The manager of the place is a friend of mine, but I don't know if that is worthy of over-looking my lack of experience when they want 3 years. We'll see.

My AF recruiter has been outstanding. He has been enthusiastic, honest and up-front about everything. He's never even asked me to commit. He basically outlined all parts of the opportunity and asked if I was interested and if I was we could get started. I was considering Navy and AF and have ended up concentrating mostly on the Air Force for something that's probably pretty small: COT is in Montgomery, AL which is 2 hours from where I live and Navy Officer Training is in Rhode Island. I know the arguments that well, you're going to end up at a far away duty station eventually anyway but I'm totally new to the military way of life, and my rationale is starting out closer to home will probably ease the transition. I'm 37 years old, so the travel is not what's at the top of my priority list. The Navy recruiter I talked to didn't really seem interested in the whole situation, so I kind of let it go. The Air Force has just felt more right for me so far. It has been basically just a gut feeling. Good Luck!

I'm a second degree as well and second the comments made so far. Pay back loans, great training, etc. The whole package far exceeds a civilian job.

I met my recruiter in-person today for the first time and got the paper work officially underway. Took care of some odds and ends. MEPS will be next. Don't know when yet because I have an injury that has to be dealt with before I can go.

Hey thanks! Before I ever talked to a recruiter, I read a lot of information on here and was expecting basically a used car salesman. But I've been surprised so far because he seems to be really on the ball.

And no I haven't done MEPS or the interview yet.

You got it, this is the first one. He's in Nashville and I'm about 3 to 4 hours away. We've talked on the phone pretty extensively. He's coming down to Huntsville, AL to pick up someone who's going to the Chief Nurse interview, so we're kind of meeting half way. He requested early on that my wife come along to the meeting because his words were, "It's not just you joining. You're family is joining too." So that has put me at ease.

I graduated this past May and have been talking to my area AF Healthcare Recruiter since July. Gathered all my paperwork and got my application together and sent by the end of August. I've got a face-to-face with the recruiter tomorrow. I might be looking at January COT. We'll see. I still have a lot of questions to ask, etc, etc. I'm 37 so this is interesting. I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

That's awesome! LOL.