PS: my aunt got these yummy cookies for us!
Howdy!
Life has been crazy busy lately and I've fallen off of posting. Before talking about my first and second semester in the DNP program I want to give you guys a brief life update.
First off, I bought a house! I was living in St. Louis and I moved back home to the midwest, where both my family and my fiancès family is. We spent about a month and a half looking at houses. Looking at houses that were 4 hours away was super difficult, and me working weekend option at the time meant I had to drive down to meet our realtor during the week. We put an offer in on a house and it got accepted, but the inspection came back with some major problems that the owners didn't want to fix.
So we didn't get that house. Then we made another trip down and looked all day and didn't find anything that was a good fit for us. I was so bummed out! Then that night our relator sent us a couple places we could see the next day. I hated all of them but my fiancè convinced me to go look. Well good thing we did because we found one that we loved! It was about 30k under our budget and it was move in ready, and it had already had an inspection done, and nothing was really wrong! It has been remodeling and they did an amazing job.
Flash forward to May 11th- we moved! So we're in that crazy hectic process of getting everything unpacked and set up. Getting the loan set up was such a pain in the butt! I had a job (which I will talk about next) lined up but obviously couldn't start working there until we actually moved. Well apparently loan companies do not like this idea. I was so scared several times that it just wasn't going to work out. But here we are!
So job update. Leaving my oncology floor was so hard. I loved that job and I loved my boss and coworkers. After being on the oncology floor for almost 9 months, I discovered that I love acute and critical care. I knew when we moved I wanted to apply for positions in the ICU. I interviewed in the neuro-trauma ICU, the cardiovascular ICU, and the Medical ICU-CCU. I felt my best fit was the MICU-CCU, because you get to see a wide variety of critically ill patients and all work with the code team in the CCU. I AM SO EXCITED TO START!! I will be shadowing 2 days with my preceptor at the end of May, and I will do new hire orientation begging of June.
Since I have 9 months of RN experience, I got a little extra $/hour. But, since I have no critical care experience, I will part of the new graduate group. I will be on orientation for 16 to 20 weeks, give or take depending on how I am doing. There is also a classroom aspect for us being "new graduates" and soon I will be getting my CCRN license (critical care RN).
If you would have told me all this (16 weeks of orientation PLUS classroom learning!?) when I graduated I would have been like HELL NO. But critical care is where I want to be, and I am SO excited to learn all the things that I never knew existed!
Okay so that's why life has been so crazy. Not to mention the DNP program! So here's some info on that. I am enrolled part time. Each year will be fall, spring, summer. No breaks:(
My first semester I, and my peers that graduated with me and are also doing the program, we took Bio Statistics and Research for Evidence-Based Practice. Both professors were really wonderful and always willing to communicate and help however they could. I personally love math, so BioStats was somewhat enjoyable for me. The book was helpful and we did a lot of practice questions. We also worked in groups which helped. More than anything it was time consuming, because we had discussion board post due like 3 times a week.
In the research class we also had a group final paper on a topic of our choosing. This class really taught you how to find research and how to analyze research. Basically is this adequate research? Is it bias? What could they have done better?
Second semester:
Healthcare Policy:
HCP was a required class. One thing to note with this class was that not everyone in the class was a first year student. This was a challenge for me because my writing isn't up to a doctorate level yet, so compared to classmates I'm sure my work looked very subpar. Unfortunately this class was extremely disorganized. Due dates were confusing, and assignments were extremely hard to understand. The professor preferred text as a means of communication, and I'm just not a big fan of communicating questions that way- it's hard to get well thought out explanations in a text! I did learn a lot about the role NPs play in deciding healthcare policies and about where we stand on certain laws that affect our practice. This class did help me critically think about things because questions were worded so weird.
This class had SO many reading assignments. First off we had to purchase like 8 different books. I swear there were like at least 100 pages to read each week. It was impossible to keep up with.
Instructional Stratagies in Nursing:
This class was an elective. There were a couple choices to choose from, and my friend picked this one so I enrolled, and oh my gosh I am so glad I did! I loved this class! It was all about how to effectively teach nursing students. This class helped me realize how passionate I am about teaching and that one day I want to have my own classes. The book was so easy to read too! The professor was great at communicating and helping explain anything.
This summer semester I will be taking Role of the DNP, and Epidemiology. I will keep everyone posted on what these entail! I start on Monday May 20th!
