I know this is a little lazy, but the following link was the first site that I stumbled upon this morning which was totally awesome. My personal favorite is a tie between “The Handless Organist” and “The Turntable Slave”, both wrong on so many levels.
I left a cliffhanger of a post in Part I of this article. This section of the article will focus more on things to help you be successful and knowledgeable in your clinical skills as a student nurse, even if you do decide to go further for your master’s or doctorate degree in nursing.
Palm Pilots
As I mentioned in the previous article, buying a palm pilot was the smartest thing that I ever did. Going on many websites, your head may swoon when thinking of all that you have to consider when buying a Palm Pilot. There are only three things that you need to worry about: price, compatibility, and memory.
Price
Most good palm pilots (PDAs) start at a range of $199 and can go as far as $499 or higher. I am not a rich person at all. The Palm Pilots (yes, plural…see below) I have bought took months for me to save up for. In my humble opinion, I would have to say that a PDA for $199-299 might be all that you need.
Before you tsk, tsk me, there are several things working for you as a student nurse. The first is that you’re a student, a poor, poor student who needs help financially. Most companies offer some kind of student discount if you order PDAs from their website like Skyscape and Epocrates. These two websites offer bundles in which you buy PDAs and medical programs together at a discounted price. There might be more sites out there, but these are the two big sites that I deal with when shopping for medical stuff for my PDA. Secondly, as I said in the last section of this article, you can always hit all of the relatives up for some palm pilot lovin’ during Christmas/Hanukkah/birthday or whatever time.
I have stewed over this topic for several months as I am finishing up my second to last semester of my Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) program. I do not consider myself an expert on this issue; however, there were several things that got me through nursing school that I could not survive without. The following stuff is mainly for an undergrad nursing student. Part II (coming soon) will be more for a nursing student in grad school.
For those who don’t know, I am a student nurse practitioner (NP). This is the main reason as to why I am not able to post as much to support my husband’s website. The other reason is partially due to the fact that nursing school has sucked the creativity out of me so much so to the point that the only creative juices I am able to produce are through the means of a power point presentation.
But, I digress. The point of this article was for me to point out how hard NPs have it in the healthcare field. It does not start in practice, but rather, in school. Since I am in the Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) program, I am required to complete a total of 750 practicum hours before I graduate. Practicum is basically where I practice in a clinical setting (with real patients and real problems) as a student NP underneath the direction of another NP or MD. This amount of hours is fine with me since I am going to be working with other NPs and MDs who will consider me to be their colleague. Also, I will be making important life and health decisions with many families which requires much training. However, in the program that I am in, I have to find people who will be willing to precept/take me under their wing in this process. My practicum placements are totally made up by me in my free time between going to school full-time and working my 3 separate part-time jobs. This results in several rejections from people (because a student would decrease their productivity) and many calls and e-mails that are unanswered (they are too busy to call me back or they just don’t have the time).
I stumbled upon this website a few weeks ago and it’s really funny. It has a little something for everyone. You just have to see for yourself instead of me ruining it for you by describing it.
www.fakegaynews.com
I have to start out by saying that my step-dad and mom are truly intelligent and business-savvy people. But they really baffle me sometimes with the stuff that they do.
Case 1: My mother just informed that she got an MP3 player. She’s had it for a whole month collecting dust. She wanted to wait until she visited my brother for him to download songs on it for her. All that she can tell me about her MP3 player is that it’s the size of a cigarette lighter.
Case 2: A few years ago, my step-dad bought a really nice digital camera. One of those ones that you would pay over $1000 for. He at least took pictures with it; however, when I came 6 months later was when I taught them both how to recharge the camera and take the pictures off of the camera and put them on their computer.
Case 3: About two months before my step-dad and mom got married, he got a new computer…a really nice one, I might add. It stayed in the box for two months because he wanted to wait for my husband (and I) to come visit for the wedding (2 months later) to come and hook it up. Computer manufacturers were even so nice as to start color-coding all the connection points in the back for the mouse, keyboard, etc. back then. So there was no real excuse for that behavior.
Case 4: Forty percent of the time that I visit my parents, they ask me to re-hook their stereo system up. For some ungodly reason, they find a need to unplug it and take it apart often, even though I tell them not to.
For the past few months, I have been thinking about working out. After many searches, I decided to join a club exclusively for women. I’m generally not usually into all the girly “Girl Power!” stuff that they do, but it fits my purpose and it’s literally up the street, so I have no excuse not to go.
This past Monday I went to the branch that is about a 10-minute drive from my house because my branch was closed. I was half-heartedly greeted by an fat employee. Now, I don’t have any room to talk because, according to every BMI chart (and my mom), I’m classified as overweight, the category just above “normal” for women. However, if I’m classified as “overweight”, then this employee is definitely classified as “morbidly obese.” Being half-heartedly greeted by this employee was a little discouraging…and made me a little angry. It’s not like all the employees at my home branch are in the greatest shape, but at least you can see that they are making an effort to work out and lose weight and inches. They are all also very motivational, which everyone can use once in a while. Maybe it’s because it was Labor Day and she didn’t feel like working. Whatever. Deal with it…fatty.
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