Kissing Nursing Assessment Goodbye!

I'm done with Nursing Assessment! Wooooooooot! Next week we start Theraputic Interventions I, our clinical class. I'm really excited about that one since we had one of the professors as a guest lecturer in Assessment - he was pretty entertaining. Kind of reminded me of Jay B and made me miss his dry humor :( I made it through another Pharm exam and now I just have to finish our clinical paper (which is a task and a half!) and I'm done!

It's been really really nice this week! It's hot and muggy and I'm soaking it up. My legs are finally free from pants! :) Brit was totally right - I miss SoCal weather and I totally took the ocean view for granted, even if I didn't always get there. The Erie Canal just isn't as pretty (even if it's just as dirty as the Malibu beaches, haha). Maybe my view will change when fall rolls around.

I met with one of our program directors this week to talk about advanced practice nursing. She told me the different between a DNP and PhD and then told me a little more about what each of the faculty's area of research was. Even though it's before clinicals, I think I'm leaning toward an NP in Acute Care and a PhD on top of it. U of R has a combined masters/PhD program, but for Acute Care or NICU I'd have to have at least 2 years of experience - fine with me! I need a break from book learning and some hands on stuff. As for my research project, I'm really intrigued by the research being done in the pediatric sleep lab and also the facial expressions of pain for babies. I'm do some further investigating this weekend (since I'm free!!) into some of the faculty that were suggested to me - translation: reading papers - and then email my advisor back to see what else she could tell me. I'm so excited to try this! I loved being in Jay B's lab, but I haven't figured out how I could do that type of research and apply my nursing skills to it. I hope to learn that sometime this year :)

I still really like my program, and even if I get super stressed out and cranky, I am still ridiculously happy. It's starting to make me sick how much I'm enjoying this.