The Graduate Nurse

Have you watched TV, listened to the radio or driven down the road lately? Depending where you live you might be bombarded with frequent advertising about nursing degrees, especially from for-profit colleges. For some of us, these advertisements have influenced us to get a degree in nursing. Major news outlets also echo the great opportunity of employment with a nursing degree. CNBC 1 and Salary.com 2 state that Nursing is among the top ten most recession proof jobs. US News & World Report Best Jobs of 2014 ranks nursing as the number 6 best jobs, evening adding that “nursing is an indispensable profession in health care” (if only actual facilities felt the same way, that’ll be a discussion for a letter date) 3 .   The media outlets aren’t the only source of positive employment opportunities for nurse, The United States Depart of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics have calculated a 19% increase of available jobs for registered nurses 4 . Due to such advertisement in 2011 ...

I am completely new to this type of social outlet, but I found that there is relatively little focus for those individuals who just graduated nursing school and are trying to transition into the profession of nursing. Of course the major nursing organizations and many schools of nursing give great advise on this transition from student to health care practitioners, yet I believe there isn’t enough focus on the difficulties nurses face in their novice and advanced beginner stages, as Dr. Patricia E. Benner, RN, Ph.D. described them in 1982. Although we all have different reasons why we studied the science of nursing, it is safe to assume we all have had some challenging days, in fact some of us have even questioned why we pursued this health care discipline. On top of the already challenging profession, the world of health care is ever changing. New health care laws, medical research and nursing practices can become difficult to keep up with when some of us are in residency pro...