Things I will take up again...

There are several things that fell by the wayside when I entered the BSN program. After a year of trial by fire, I know which ones I want to take up again--those things I craved and actively missed when I had no time for them.

# DDR! I'm going to get my DDR pad back out for the PS2.
# Vinyasa yoga. I haven't had any time for this at all, and during especially stressful periods I missed it like CRAZY.
# LIVEJOURNAL.
# Chatting on AIM
# Cooking from scratch
# Photography: my entire family went in together and bought me an extremely expensive camera for graduation. It's a Sony DSLR-A330. I'm so excited I could explode, and PHOTOS WILL BE TAKEN. I wonder if I should get an extra battery for it? [I'm giving the camera in this photo, my very pampered Sony DSC-H2, to Courtney because she's lusted after it since I got it, and I wanted to give her something for housewarming that I KNEW she'd love.]

Good grief, y'all. I feel so FREE right now.

Job hunting & career goals

I'm job hunting. We've lived this long on just Bryan's salary & we don't have school to pay for right now, so I'm being a bit picky. I want an ER job, specifically one at night. Nighttime is when all the crazy stuff happens, and I want the ER for the craziness and the action. I'm actually thinking, crazy as this sounds, of The Med in Memphis. I'd only be commuting 3 days a week, and they have both a trauma center (named after Elvis Presley!) and a burn center. It's not the big burn center in the area (that honor goes to the one housed at Arkansas' Children's in Little Rock), nor is it accredited by the American Burn Association, but it is a burn center nonetheless.

Here are the websites I'm stalking:

St. Bernard's career opportunities. Beware the automatically-played advertisement type thing. It's halfway down the page on the right if you wanna turn it off. You will.

NEA Baptist Memorial career opportunities.

Career opportunities at The Med. You have to click in a few places; it's a generated page, so I can't link it.

My long term career goals are starting to come together now that I have time to think beyond just "RN." There are at least 2 things I KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt that I want.

1) My SANE certification. SANE stands for "sexual assault nurse examiner" and I'm quite sure I want the "adult/adolescent" certification. I'm not sure about "pediatric". My communication skills are at their best with adults or teens, and I'm not sure I'd be very good at pediatric. However, I won't rule it out. This is something that's been extremely important to me since I first learned about it, and it's the major reason I am interested in trauma in general. If I limit myself to only burns, I'm limiting myself from things this--things that are just as important to me, if not more.

2) A DNP, or doctorate of nursing practice. Yes indeed, I'm already thinking about more school. Not right now, of course; I want much more experience than I have right now (which is not hard). But eventually this is where I'm going. I wanted a career that gave me two things: the ability to work with people directly and the ability to take my education to the highest available levels. This type of program incorporates both. It's for the nurse who wants a doctorate, but who wants to remain at the bedside. The goal of the DNP is to drive evidence-based practice; these are the nurses who are conducting research, deciding how that information applies to nursing practice, then figuring out how to implement that in direct patient care. I can go through a master's first, or I can go straight from a BSN. One of the schools offering the DNP, you'll notice, is Texas Women's University, in Dallas where my in-laws live.

Thinking about these now, I can see how one could greatly benefit the other. There's a potential here for me to really advance the handling & treatment of sexual assault victims. I wonder if there's someone out there who's interested in mental health nursing who'd like to team up with me on this? HMMMMM?

For now, however, first things first. JOB. Anyone need an ER nurse?