Senior AFROTC Nursing Student with questions!

[JaysFanKate]

Hi everyone! My name is Katie, and I am a senior AFROTC nursing student from Nebraska. We are currently getting ready to fill out our Form 53s with location preferences, but our detachment has been unable to give me and the one other nursing student at our detachment any information. I found this forum today, and I have already looked at several threads that have given me more information than our cadre has! I was just wondering if anyone could provide guidance on things like possible locations for new graduates? How soon we get orders to go to NTP? How long is NTP? Do we choose med-surg or OB right away, or are there other areas we can choose to work in?

[midinphx, BSN]

As a new grad you choose the path of OB or med/surg. Med/surg really covers almost all areas in the hospital other than specialty areas like ICU. The med/surg NTP nurses I know were placed all over the hospital from pads to pacu to tele to straight med/surg. I think being a broader nurse gives you a great span of potential experiences. I'm AF ICU and the possibilities for basic are rather small. I'm in San Antonio at Lackland. I know this sounds negative, but try to avoid San Antonio right now. We fully merged with the army at SAMMC last year and the AF is still rebuilding its leadership structure. It's a great place to work, but as a new person into the AF, I was lacking any mentoring and finding out how to get around in the AF. It's getting better finally, and I love San Antonio now, but it was a really hard adjustment.

I didn't do NTP. I think it is 13weeks or so. Only 3 locations - Scottsdale, Az (at a great civilian hospital), Lackland, Tx. And I forgot the last one. You can check out the nursing corps Facebook which is newly built at AFMS - USAF Nursing Services - it's not loaded with a ton of info, but worth looking at.

[CRF250Xpert]

Have an active duty cadre with a CAC log onto AMS. Go to officer assignments. Search by AFSC and O1 through O3. This will give you a list of the places that actually have the job for which you trained. If you put down bases that you like, but the USAF doesn't have your job, you'll end up sad that you got the 1st place the USAF needed a warm body instead of a place on your list.