Re working. Will just share my daughter’s recent story. (Not going to quote anyone because I think nuances can be unique with each student and program. Sometimes during these discussions I feel like we get bogged down arguing about details and lose the main point.) So I am speaking generally here.
DD was a Nursing student (in a BSN program). She knew she wanted to get hospital experience while she was in school for a few reasons: she needed the money (had another job but not in the medical field), it would likely help her to get a hospital job there later, she hoped (because it’s not an absolute), and she was excited to get started (wanted to be a nurse since she was little). The hospital she wanted to work at (because they’re all a little different) required either a CNA certification or nursing students to have taken their first nursing course in college in which they learn how to take vital signs and provide basic care to patients. It cost something like $1200 dollars to obtain the CNA certificate so she waited until she had that first nursing course under her belt which was offered second semester of sophomore year (after students complete a strong foundation in the sciences). She got the ball rolling in March of that semester so that as soon as classes were over that spring, she started orientation on her hospital job (which was labeled a “Co op” to differentiate nursing students from CNAs, though the job is essentially the same). This gave her two solid years of hospital experience prior to graduation.
Turned out that hospital job was one of the best things she could’ve done because it gave her the ‘real world‘ experience she needed to get ‘thrown to the wolves’ once she graduated - in spring of 2020. Just to clarify, under normal circumstances it can feel like getting thrown to the wolves as a new nurse because patients are more acutely ill than ever before and hospital wards can feel like war zones with staffing challenges and blistering new technology every day, etc. But that particular spring it was worse, because of Covid. In fact, the last semester of her training was insane because she had a great senior practicum experience going at a top hospital one-on-one with an RN in the Emergency Room when one Tuesday she was notified that clinical experiences were on hold, only to never resume again.
That spring, colleges everywhere had to scramble to create ‘virtual patient experiences’ for their students in order for them to complete their education. For an older nurse like me it was pretty fascinating to see how that worked. They made patient situations as close to what one would really see (with patients swearing and all!), and there was interaction between the nurse and the patient. In order to continue on with the encounter the nurse learning virtually had to say the right things to the patient, read about things a patient was experiencing like they would for real on the job, and answer questions successfully, etc. I was suitably impressed. Not as good as the real thing, but pretty good. But I was so glad my daughter had already been working intensely with patients on the job so she knew how to interact with them for real. And the unit she was working on gave her both medical and surgical experience, which was perfect. (Sometimes jobs can lead to narrow experiences where students or new nurses can get pigeonholed into working with just a specific population of patients instead of a wide variety.) The ability to interact successfully with patients is a skill that cannot be underestimated.
Nursing students have ‘clinical experiences’ in medical settings as part of their education. Generally they go in groups to hospital units with a clinical instructor to help care for patients, but the instructor has six or more students to oversee so what they do there can be limited, and they only stay for six hours or so, then break off for post-conference where they meet as a group and discuss concepts for the day. Students may branch off to go to the OR that day if their patient is going there, or other places with their assigned patient, or off with a specialty nurse for the day like wound care, IV therapy, infection control, etc., and those can be really great experiences. It’s not until their senior year that they work one on one with a preceptor who works for the hospital and not the school. DD had a couple of experiences that weren’t great as part of a clinical group - once or twice there were two nurses working with one patient because there weren’t enough patients on the unit (suitable for students) so that was awkward. A student that DD had to share a patient with one day had no real-world experience and had a lot of questions to DD (!) about how to do basic things. DD had to run to go find a BP cuff one time and left the patient room to go find one. The student who never worked was perplexed about how and where she knew how to find one. These are things that can really trip up a new nurse on a job in a fast-paced environment and nurse managers who hire know this, so a candidate with work experience will likely have an advantage.
When she was well into her first year of working as a new nurse (on the unit she worked on during school), DD said she felt that her work experience was the thing that helped her transition to the role the most. Thirty some-odd years had passed between my daughter’s college experiences and my own, but that was one thing that had not changed, as there were nursing students I’d been in school with who didn’t work in the field, either, and many of them struggled in different ways. One actually decided to become a truck driver after graduation
but later I heard she did eventually get a job as a nurse. So I do think that working is good, but that longer hours should be saved for summers as workload during the school year prohibits working too much. Most programs say the student should not work more than 20 hrs/week, but don’t outright say they shouldn’t work at all (at least the ones I know of).
the seniors took a class called 'current world problems' and while it touched on some aspects of personal finance it totally ignored the biggest financial issue facing these soon to be high school grads.
