Steven Link

The beginning of a new career carries with it immense excitement and anticipation. As a student, you have spent countless hours studying and preparing for the goal of one day making the transition from undergraduate to peer. This is exactly where I stand right now, from the outside looking in on the profession of nursing. Will I join the profession and find the same challenges and frustrations that so many nurses warn me of in each clinical rotation? Most likely, but I hope to also experience the rewards of providing assistance to fellow men and women at what is possibly one of the most challenging moments in their lives. Their fears, their shortcomings, their trepidations are all laid bare for you to observe. And that is just the psychiatric portion of their needs. As a nurse, you have the initial privilege to be the advocate for their health care. It is a responsibility that can never be taken lightly, although the full realization of such a task can easily overwhelm those of us entering nursing.
 
While I am aware of the responsibilities and challenges awaiting me as a nurse, nursing is everything that I desire at this moment.  Nursing school prepares us to be profession nurses and introduces us to the many roles of the nurse. Perhaps that sums up the purpose of nursing school. We are not here primarily to learn skills, but to learn how to carry our responsibilities on our shoulders with grace and courage. We welcome new life into the world, care for those who are merely seconds from death, and learn to love and respect all tasks, both critical and trivial in between. The difficulty of completing such a challenge becomes considerably thornier for an adult student. We bring our “grown up” lives back to school with us.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation allows individuals such as myself to mark off two formidable obstacles on our list of dream barriers: funding and support.

The last important piece of the puzzle is finding where to draw our inspiration for such a task. I have found that my patients provide plentiful sources of inspiration on a daily basis to anyone that is willing to look. Being a student is challenging, but it is nothing compared to what some of our patients are ultimately enduring. Studying for finals is hard, but it is not on the level with checking into a hospital with the very real fear that you may never return home again. It is not spending six months in physical therapy relearning how to walk. It is not handing your son to a surgeon and waiting for news while his heart is stopped so that his life can be saved from the congenital defect that would have otherwise brought his demise. The patients, their families, their friends, this is where inspiration lives and breathes.  I am thankful for my perspective, for the limitless support from my own family on this journey, for the charge to succeed from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and for the duty of care that my future patients will one day bestow upon me. I am grateful to soon become a nurse.