Unsought Input

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.

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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).

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