syost

wow....harder than mine. Mine's at 75!!!

"if the school is telling you that a hospital will hire you as a cma, run away fast. get your cna if you want to work in a hospital." - absolutely!!!!!! cmas and cnas are different things here; i'm not sure if they are in your area. a cma is a certified medical assistant. it's a nine-month program with cna, phlebotomy, and medical office assisting embedded in it. they're the ones who tend to work in doctor's offices because they have the phlebotomy and medical office assisting. the cna doesn't help with doctor's offices around here. i'm a cna and the hospital here seems to have a really inconsistent hiring philosophy. i know cnas who have and haven't been able to get jobs there, regardless of nursing home/home health experience. now that i'm in nursing school and doing my clinicals there, i know that most of the techs (that's what they call them at the hospitals around here - patient care tech) i work with *don't* have their cna certificate. when they were hired, though, they all worked graveyard shifts. the daytime shifts were offered to existing staff according to seniority. if person number one didn't want it, then they offered it to number two, and so on. if they couldn't find someone in-house or within the system who wanted it, then they'd open the search to the outside. but generally speaking, you have to earn your stripes working 7p-7a. that's the other thing, by the way. in the hospital, they're all 7p-7a or 7a-7p. they're all 12s with no flexibility in the schedule. in the nursing homes, you're more likely to find 8 hours. or 16 hours, if that works better. (you'd only have to work 2 shifts to get all your benefits.) and day shifts are pretty easy to get, too. this is all probably way more than you wanted to know, lol.

I think you hit the nail on the head....unless you've been here, you can't possibly understand.

During seminar my first term, the professor actually put up a power point slide show pointing out basically what another poster here said.....they broke it down. In our program, we are to expect the following each week: Classroom hours: 13 Reading/Studying Time for those class hours: ~15-20 Clinical hours: 20 Clinical prep/post hours: 5-6, minimum Clearly this is more than a full time job. And it was stressed to us that to be successful, we really should put in that 15-20 hours reading and studying, although they conceded that most don't. At first. Until the first grades come in. The discussion then went to the fact that while they know we all have to support ourselves somehow and therefore most of us do work, ultimately, this is a full-time day program and the program is set up to be a FULL TIME program. And then they finished with: every graduating class experiences approximately a 30% divorce rate from when they entered the program to when they graduated. They told us that not to discourage us, but to encourage us to work with our spouses/significant others and be honest about what a toll it will take on us. We were "assigned" the "homework" of sharing that powerpoint with them and then to sit down and work a plan that will give us the time we need to do what we need to do. And *also* to listen to them and make sure we hear them as they tell us what they need from us. My own particular method is to study after school until dinner (he cooks). During dinner, we start a DVD we've rented and watch it. After the DVD is over, I go back to studying. Most nights we do go to bed at different times, but I make a point of turning in when he does at least twice a week, even if it means I have to get up early the next day. For friends and family, I simply send out an email at the start of each term that gives an update, asks them about what's going on in their lives, then saying, "peace out; I'll talk again in three months!!!!"

Hey there, I'm new and so glad to find this place!!! I have a pharmacology exam on Monday morning (3/7) and it's over upper and lower GI drugs. I did not do as well as I would have liked on the last exam. It brought my previously high grade down quite significantly. I'm studying my lecture transcription and power points, I'm outlining, I'm cross-charting drugs, SE, and Contraindications. Any other ideas? Any hints on remembering drug names for each type of drug (antiemetic, proton pump inhibitors, IBS/IBD, etc)? Thanks.