Thinking About the Journey

I came into this program with a very open mind as to what specialty I want to consider for a future career. I’m in the stage of ruling out things I know I don’t want to do rather than picking a specific one. I do have 3 specialties that I’ve been thinking about since applying to school; public health, pediatrics and critical care. Through courses in college I grew an interest in public health and was very excited to find out that becoming a public health nurse is an option for me. With Pediatrics, I’ve always loved working with children. I feel very comfortable communicating with them and I love making them laugh. As for critical care this is something that I never really considered until I started nursing school. My grandmother became ill back in March and I spent many hours in the ICU visiting and getting to see how things go over those 8 weeks. She recently passed and how those nurses treated her and our family was so great that I think it might be something I want to do in my future.

Before looking over our books and other course content I had no idea what type of class I was coming into. When I first heard of evidence-based practice I just figured we would be learning how to properly look up things we needed to learn about or improve. In a way this is correct, there is much more than goes behind EBP. I assumed it would be a far lengthy process because I was thinking of it more as research. I was a biology major prior to this so it was all I knew. I am looking forward to learning throughout this semester because I believe it will give me the tools I need to be a successful nurse. Nurses need to think on the fly and be creative. Learning more about how to apply research, EBP, and quality improvement within the clinical setting will make both my future patients and team have more successful outcomes. The knowledge I will gain from this course will help me work through my nursing process in clinical this summer.