Mary’s Pad

So today marked the beginning of the process of getting myself authorized to work as an RN once I graduate. I had to attend an OPT meeting (the first one of two) with my international advisor to discuss the way forward and all the paperwork I have to do for immigration stuff to be processed. It was a brief but very enlightening meeting. Interestingly, this was the very first time that I have met with the advisor since I started the program, so it was a “hello nice to meet you, let’s prepare for goodbye” kind of meeting. Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details, except to say that it’s a long process that will involve, as all things seem to do, me shelling out some money, and a lot of paperwork changing hands, and ofcourse the inevitable waiting and checking the mail every day. It also involves me making some decisions about when I want to start my OPT, which will largely be dictated by where I work. If I choose to work on a Med-Surg floor or somewhere like OB (no chance of that!), I can basically start working right out of school, even before I sit the licensing exam, but if I go into the ER, and I think Critical Care also (but I’m not sure of this one), then I have to pass my Boards before starting to work, so then I would need to start my OPT a little later. I get a 60-day window from my last day of the semester, which is the 22nd of Dec. I can’t really make that decision until I figure out what floor I want to work on, and try to secure an interview. Which brings me to the second decision I had to make today.

After my final exam, on December 3th, I have to take a one-week senior elective. We choose a floor that we would like to be on for that one week. We get a preceptor on that floor and we work his or her shift for that week. We get to follow the preceptor around, see what they do, and do whatever tasks they assign to us and that we feel comfortable doing. The purpose of the senior elective, as I see it, is to allow us more exposure in areas we may be interested in or thinking of working in, and also to expose us more to the actual working shift as opposed to the student shifts that we have. We get to choose two floors that we want and then, based on the availability of preceptors, and whatever restrictions we’ve set, we get assigned to one of those floors. Today we got the little white piece of paper to choose our senior elective areas. We had to write down two floors, in order of preference, and then write down if we had any shift preferences or restrictions, for example no nights, or “only 12 hour shifts”, etc.

This was a tough one for me, because, as I’ve mentioned before, I am caught in a dilemma. I love emergency medicine and nursing, and this is where I have thought I would want to start, but I have also been pondering about spending some time first on a med-surg floor, specifically the renal/liver floor so that I can polish up my skills, my time management and prioritization skills, and just build up my knowledge more. This semester, as we’ve been learning Critical Care stuff, I have started to fall in love with that too… argghhh! I am supposed to be narrowing my choices down, not adding to them. What makes this even dicier is that I haven’t had my critical care rotation yet, it starts this coming week, so I don’t really know if I’ll like it or hate it.

Anyway, back to the white piece of paper. I decided to bite the bullet, and put my choices down as critical care, and ER, in that order. Now it’s just a matter of waiting! My instructor is convinced that I will love Critical Care. I guess I’ll start finding out this week!