Over winter break during my Freshman year of college, I attended the Virginia Nursing Students Association conference. It took place at Liberty University. I attended with several other Longwood nursing students and nursing professors. At the conference, I listened to several different lectures. The first lecture was presented by a hospice nurse. She presented a PowerPoint on how to care for dying patients, their family members, and yourself as a hospice nurse. She played a video that depicted the interaction between a hospice nurse and her dying patient and how the nurse’s job looked like each day. It was a very thoughtful and educational presentation. I learned a lot about how to respectfully and appropriately care for dying patients. I also attended a lecture on how to treat people with bullet wounds in a public setting. The class was specifically designed to teach people how to treat others in the event of a public shooting. This was a highly beneficial and educational class. I was sad that it was so important to attend, but I was grateful that I learned the skill. I learned how to assess the depth of a bullet wound, how to dress it, and how to apply a tourniquet. I was glad to learn this so that in the event of an emergency I can help people without having to wait for hospital equipment. Lastly, I attended one of my own nursing professor’s, Dr. Little, lecture. She described her volunteer trips to Ecuador to provide nursing services to the impoverished. She explained the different kinds of medical problems she saw, how she treated them, and how different the culture was. It was very interesting to learn about and made me realize how in need some countries’ medical systems are. The conference taught me about so many different aspect of being a nurse and really helped me understand the job better and how to be a good nurse. I felt that I gained professional knowledge from the experience.

The summer before my Senior year of college, I started a job as a nurse extern on the neurological intensive care unit at Lynchburg General Hospital. This job has taught me so much about nursing that I feel incredibly excited and ready to be a nurse. I was placed with one nurse and followed her throughout the shift. She taught me so much about administering medications, talking to doctors, understanding and assessing conditions, and keeping everything organized. I was able to give many medications of all different forms, do tracheostomy care, do intubation care, balance external ventricular drains, and assess and draw blood from arterial lines. I felt that this greatly helped me as a nursing student. I also got to do code stroke nursing and assess stroke victim patients. I learned how to do the NIHSS assessment really well, administer TPA, and prepare patients for a thrombectomy. I learned that I love neurology and intensive care nursing and that I really want to continue with this path. This job greatly helped me develop my physical nursing skills and my professional nursing skills.