Career Fairs Helps Ease Post-Graduation Concerns

A career fair is a great way to see what health care institutions are available in your area and what opportunities you will have when you graduate. It expands the possibilities outside of the scope of just the hospital setting—which is often the focus during school. Some participants may include local prison facilities, schools, companies, government agencies, etc.

Recently my school held a career fair and I was amazed to see the many options that were available to me. Not only were there multiple local hospitals present, but each one of them offered something different. Some hospitals offered internships during the summer, while others expanded on their new facilities and benefits.

A career fair is a great way to “shop” for your future job. Instead of looking for jobs online or in the newspaper when you graduate, you can see firsthand what is available and even ask questions to the representatives while they are there. Some facilities even have nursing recruiters who will assist you in completing the application process and ensure that the transition from being a student nurse to a nurse at their facility goes as smoothly as possible.

Even if staying in your local area is not what you plan on doing, career fairs are still great learning opportunities. It can help to narrow the focus by discovering what some health care employers are offering. Once you see what is available and being offered you can start to fine tune what you are looking for in an employer and narrow it down to a place that suits your needs (perhaps one that offers relocation expenses, a sign-on bonus, tuition reimbursement or a newly remodeled department in your area of focus, etc.).

The career fairs that I have attended have helped ease my post-graduation concerns and I have found them all to be worth my time. I hope that you will discover the same.

Balancing What We Learn With What We See

In nursing school we are taught textbook nursing and how we should practice our evidence-based nursing skills. Unfortunately our clinical experience doesn’t always back up and support this information. But that’s where “do as I say and not as I do” comes into play, right?

When nurses do something in our clinical experience that is not “by the book” it is, for the most part, very obvious. Such as a nurse poking a hole in her sterile glove so she can palpate a vein for a PICC insertion—definitely not by the book. But, other things are a little less vague. One such thing happened during clinical where a nurse removed an arterial line and advised us to hold pressure for 3-5 minutes. Then that very week we had a test question involving removal of an arterial line and the answer was at least 5-10 minutes (depending on if the patient is on anticoagulants or not). This and other similar occurrences can make test time and preparing for the NCLEX more complicated than we’d like it to be. We are constantly told to “go with what the books say” instead of what we see in the real world but sometimes this can be a hard juggle.

As we prepare for the NCLEX, I think the most important thing we can do is to remember what we read and what we were taught in lecture first and foremost. This is not to say that some questions may be answered from our clinical experiences, but that our primary focus should be coming from the theory part of our education.

Has anyone else had similar experiences? Or any tips on how to balance what we learn with what we see?