Reflection
My junior year of college was 50% finished and I still had not figured out what to do about an EDGE project. I had not even begun to brainstorm what I wanted to do. Everything that I had wanted to use as an EDGE project was something that I had already done; therefore, it didn't qualify as an accurate project. I wanted to do something life-changing and out of my comfort zone, but nothing was coming up that was fitting this criteria. One day in October 2015, one of our nurse administrators sent out an email about the "Mayo Clinic Summer III Nursing Externship" in Rochester, Minnesota.
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THE Mayo Clinic?? I could never do something like that; that's way too far away and I could never be qualified... I thought.
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I threw this opportunity out of my mind thinking that I had no desire to do it. Fast forward all the way to early January of 2016 and I had a quick feeling to just apply for the externship. Why not? I applied January 14, 2016 not realizing that the due date for the application was January 15. Two months later in March I got my acceptance letter to be a nursing intern at the Mayo Clinic. From that day on I knew that this would be the challenging, life-changing, and out-of-my-comfort-zone project I was looking for.
When applying to this externship I had to provide a cover letter, my resume, my CPR certification, and two one-page essays. One essay asked me why I wanted to be a nurse and the other was what my favorite quote was and why. When first finding out about my acceptance I had to send a confirmation of my desire to be an intern. I sent an email saying how excited I was for the externship and they further sent me more information about the job. I had to send in copies of my current vaccinations, a back-ground check, my housing information, car/license identification and my banking information. It was quite a long process to send everything out to Minnesota and wait for more information to come back, but I had good educators that were helping me from the Mayo Clinic.
I had so many things going through my mind when preparing for this opportunity. My biggest goal for the summer was so be more confident in my nursing abilities and to learn how to properly communicate. I definitely did both this past summer. My assessment skills are so much better than they were because I was not as scared as I had been in the past. Before I was so worried to be doing something wrong, but with the practice the Mayo Clinic offered for my assessment and other nursing skills I feel so much more confident going into a patient's room. I also learned better communication skills working with all sorts of different healthcare workers and patients. This was probably my greatest achievement during the summer because my nurses told me that they were comfortable with me doing things on my own. This was the highlight of the summer.
As with before, I definitely reached my goal of gaining more confidence and getting better with communication. I could not have asked for a better outcome because not only do I feel more confident, but I also feel more prepared for my future job as a nurse; however, I did not expect this. Before leaving for the Mayo Clinic I didn't think I would grow as much as I did. I was so scared of the unknown that all I thought about was what if I fail? What if I don't end up liking this? I definitely got a better outcome than I initially thought.
I found that I had more leadership than I originally thought. My leadership skills developed in that I can communicate so much better. Before my externship I had such a hard time talking to people because I was afraid of being wrong. At the Mayo Clinic I learned that communication is one of the most important things you must be good at to be a good nurse. Whether it's telling a doctor there's a problem with a patient's medication or telling a family member a patient's diagnosis, nurses need to be on top of their game when it comes to communicating w/ people in a hospital-setting, or any setting. I felt like leadership requires communication skills in order to be successful and competent. I felt like that's where I grew the most over the course of the externship.
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One big insight I learned about leadership with my experience at the Mayo Clinic was that leadership comes in all different shapes and sizes. In a hospital, a lot of the time people believe that the doctors are the leaders of a patient's course of treatment, but that's entirely wrong. Doctors couldn't do their job without nurses, therapists, nursing assistants, social workers and vice versa. Whether our leadership is by mentioning to a doctor a treatment idea or comforting a fellow nursing assistant when in great stress or grief over a loss of a patient, we see all kinds of different leaders. Nursing is leadership in that we don't just provide care, but we provide support and teaching throughout the course of a patient's time at the hospital.
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I am so grateful that I had this opportunity and for SUU giving me the chance to take a chance. I believe that SUU put an experiential requirement for the students to allow for branching out rather than education just in the classroom. I feel being an outdoorsy school we do have a lot of opportunities to do things outside of the college community, but a lot of the time we have no motivation to do it. The thought of a required project was menacing when first coming to Southern Utah, but without it I wouldn't have done this externship. This school wants us doing more than just sitting in a classroom or joining a club. This school wants us to get out of our comfort zones and experience life literally outside of college.
We all know that EDGE means Education Designed to Give Experience, but it is more than that. This metaphor also means that when applying for future careers, SUU students have an "EDGE" or a little extra something over other applicants. As a nurse I will be applying to positions along with dozens of others, but I can put my EDGE project on my resume to make me stand out among the crowd. It's such an awesome thing that students from SUU will be able to add more to their resumes that will allow them to have a better chance at landing a position to their future career goals.
Overall, this whole project was life-changing and I can't thank SUU enough for pushing me to complete something like this.
