Research this!

I love your candid take on this. I, too, am concerned about what I'm getting myself into academically. I'm due to start in Jan. I'll send you a PM.

Ok folks, I've had it! I am absolutely nauseated at the thought of another "research" paper. I DO NOT WANT TO BE A RESEARCHER!! Yes, I agree that research is important, but ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! There is no way in HE#% I am pursuing a DNP, as it is just more research! How many studies can you repeat? It reaches a point where you're just regurgitating what someone else previously vomited. I am so sick of academics who force you to submit to their mindless AND MEANINGLESS will (APA) just because you have to. Proof of the futility of this whole exercise is the fact that each "read through" yields more meaningless suggestions. (How is it that this paragraph was perfectly acceptable two "reads" ago, but now needs to be revised?) I know I will have to utilize research and EBP (another term I am sick of), but I learned how to do that three courses ago, which, by the way, were REPEATS of undergrad!! Academics will absolutely KILL the future of NP's just as surely as they are killing my will to go on. Having to pretend that this crap is the 'be all end all' is exhausting. One must pretend, because, if they "sense" that you feel you've researched enough, you risk being sent to a Soviet re-education camp. How about some more hard science instead of some APA formatted nonsense presented on a poster? You may be picking up on the fact that I am really struggling not to use some choice adjectives, but NP education must change or it will die. NP education, in its present form, is more suited to churning out nurse educators or researchers than clinicians. No, NP's are not trying to be physicians, but if NP's want to DO the same thing physicians do, they'd darn well better learn the SAME things physicians do. This situation has reached the ridiculous threshold, and in reality, the consensus model does jack-squat to help the situation out.

This is so true. I know there is a place for research in nursing but does it have to be soooo much for NP's who are not entering the education/theory/research field? Reading and learning about all those theories over and over and over again every semester just seemed like a waste of time to me. I wanted more patho, pharm, advanced assessment. I don't know about anyone else but when I was reading all of those nursing theories and concepts and frameworks with the convoluted and circuitous thinking and recycled words, I just thought it makes nursing look desperate, like nursing is trying sooooooo hard to prove to other professions that it is a legitimate field. We are TOTALLY legitimate just by essence of what we do, we shouldn't have to make it seem like it is rocket science just to make nursing look valid to others. Anyway, that's just 2 cents!!!

I can't agree more! I just finished my first MSN semester. I really enjoyed patho and assessment. Yet theory was the most time consuming, boring, and by far the most useless class. I felt like I should be spending 2-3 times as much time learning about being a clinician. Yet the lion's share of my time was spent doing a literature review and fretting over APA.

Nursefin, I really agree with your point about nurses seeming desperate to prove themselves to other professions. That was the focus of so many discussion boards; trying to push for nursing research in order to distinguish ourselves as a discipline, as if nurses are looked down upon. I didn't go to NP school to be a researcher. I want to be a practitioner!