And that’s before they take the required licensing exam.
“It’s a great outlook, and it’s a great career,” said Carla Gross, chairwoman of NDSU’s nursing department. “The sky’s the limit as to what you can do with that degree.”
But recent landscape architecture graduate David Eisenbraun said the 20 students in his class can’t look forward to that kind of abundant job market. So far, only two have found work that will count toward their licensing requirements.
“Myself and one other person got actual landscape architecture jobs since we graduated,” he said.
Not all college degrees are equal when it comes to finding work, according to a recent report from researchers at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce who researched 2010 and 2011 U.S. census data to find which majors had the best job prospects.
Gross said the latest “Hard Times: College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings” report, released last week, was hardly a surprise.
Recent nursing graduates had the lowest unemployment rate of 4.8 percent. NDSU’s nursing department has seen 95 to 96 percent of its prelicensure graduates land jobs in their field for the past few years, with the rest either going on for advanced education or choosing not to enter the workforce.
“All we’re hearing is they need more nurses, and there’s a critical shortage across the nation for nurses,” she said.
Recent architecture graduates didn’t fare as well in the study, with 12.8 percent unemployed – the second-highest rate by major in this report. Further darkening the outlook, employed graduates weren’t necessarily working in their field.
Recent graduates with information systems majors had the highest unemployment rate of 14.7 percent, but Limin Zhang said that finding doesn’t fit with what’s happening at NDSU.
The assistant professor said management information systems majors have the highest employment rate of all majors in the business college – about 93 percent for those who graduated during the 2011-2012 academic year.
“For those students who graduated in May, almost all of those have jobs already,” Zhang said. “For the juniors who plan to graduate in the next year or so, I think almost everybody went for summer internships in companies around the region.”
A majority of programs at Minnesota State University Moorhead continue to boast high employment rates, even during the recession, said Sarah Miller, director of MSUM’s Career Development Center.
She said 96.3 percent of graduates from the class of 2011 who entered the workforce found a job in their field.
MSUM surveys its recent graduates, asking if they’ve been able to find related employment within a year.
“The overall news is it’s really good for graduates,” Miller said. “I think students who want to get a job within 12 months after graduation do.”
Cindy Urness, interim chairwoman of NDSU’s architecture program, said unemployment in the field was “very high” in recent years. It’s closely tied to the construction industry and follows that cycle of growth and downturn, especially during the nationwide recession.
The NDSU Career Center’s 2012 annual employment report shows that just 42 percent of the 26 landscape architecture graduates had jobs and 48 percent of the 58 students who earned a master of architecture degree found work by the time the report was compiled. Many graduates didn’t respond to the survey, which can lead to an apparent employment rate that’s lower than reality.
Urness said architecture students here have one big advantage: a stronger than average local economy that kept the impact of the national downturn to a minimum.
“Our graduates have fared better in seeking jobs, here in particular,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of our Minnesota students actually decide to stay in North Dakota to start their careers.”
Urness said the other good news is that graduates from recent years who couldn’t find related work after college are now landing good jobs – and prospects are looking up.
“The prediction about our professions in general is that we’re actually perhaps going to start to see a shortage as early as 2014,” she said.
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Researchers at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce examined 2009 and 2010 U.S. census data to determine what college majors are most likely to lead to jobs.
“Hard Times, College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings 2013: Not All College Degrees are Created Equal” says the unemployment rate for recent nursing grads is 4 percent.
Meanwhile, the typical unemployment rate for majors in many liberal arts fields is double that, and that of architecture and fine arts graduates is more than triple at 13.9 and 11.1 percent, respectively.
What the researchers don’t know is if the graduates were working in their major. Some college majors don’t have clear career paths.
That was reflected in unemployment rates for ethnic and civilization studies (10.1 percent) and philosophy and religious studies (10.8 percent).
Other majors, such as architecture, have suffered in the economic downturn, although their unemployment is gradually getting better, said Tony Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s education center.
In fact, only 50 to 54 percent of recent college grad work in their majors, Carnevale said in an interview.
]]>1st – Come to terms with reality and what you have to work with. My boyfriend of three years lives in SF, and I went to school here in the Midwest because it was much more economical; I simply couldn’t afford to live the CA lifestyle while in school. Therefore, I of course set my sights only on getting to the Bay Area while in nursing school. And then…my sights started getting set on anything in California…and towards the end of school (and after a few close nabs at a CA residency spot, dangit!), I realized if I wanted employment right out of school, it would mean having to stay here in the Midwest to get some experience. And I have to, because I don’t have a pot to **** in or a roof over my head if I don’t have an income, I was living off loans through school. No rich mommy and daddy to hand me things here. Note though, that I am in a pretty big urban city that is still quite competitive – so this article is definitely applicable, I wasn’t handed a job in some Kansas farmtown. Anyways, this is sort of a new grad analogy to the first step in AA…come to terms with what you have and things will start to be more realistic! It is 100x easier to get a job where you are going to school.
2nd – Be flexible, but have some goal ideas as well. Just like a diet or exercise plan, it’s a lot easier to gets things accomplished when you have specific goals. I started to realize during clinicals that I was flexible, but really didn’t have interest in OB or Peds (which is great, since these are so ******* popular…not sure why, hehe). I really liked working with older populations, I liked more acute and sick populations, and I liked roles where there was a lot of teaching involved (I like to get up on my soapbox and preach about diet, nutrition, and mind-body health…yay, Medicine floors!). From here, I picked a few specific floors and went from there.
]]>The University of Akron (Ohio) graduate is not alone: Of all the majors that students can choose, nursing offers the best chance for employment.
“I tell graduates not to worry, that they almost certainly will land a job within a few months of graduating,” UA nursing administrator Cheryl Buchanan said. “If they would go to Florida or Michigan, they would find a job immediately.”
Researchers at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce examined 2009 and 2010 U.S. census data to determine what college majors are most likely to lead to jobs.
“People need to pay attention to this,” center director Tony Carnevale said. “It tells you that if you really want to be an architect, that’s fine, but you’re going to have to think more about what your plan is.”
“Hard Times, College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings 2013: Not All College Degrees are Created Equal” says the unemployment rate for recent nursing graduates is 4 percent. Meanwhile, the typical unemployment rate for majors in many liberal arts fields is double that, and that of architecture and fine arts graduates is more than triple at 13.9 and 11.1 percent, respectively.
What the researchers don’t know is if the graduates were working in their major. Some college majors don’t have clear career paths.
That was reflected in the unemployment rates for area ethnic and civilization studies (10.1 percent) and philosophy and religious studies (10.8 percent).
Other majors, such as architecture, have suffered in the economic downturn, although their unemployment is gradually getting better, Carnevale said.
]]>1. Your Facebook “friends” may very well not be your actual friends - in every case that I’ve dealt with, management became aware of the offending posting when a “friend” of the poster brought it to their attention. And your privacy settings are no protection.
2. You do not have rights of “free speech” related to your work - the First Amendment protects you against the government intruding on your free speech rights - it says nothing about your employer.
3. If you are not covered by a union contract, in most parts of the US you are an at will employee and can be fired for any reason or no reason - except for a very small number of protected reasons like your age or race.
4. If you post something that would make anyone reading it think they might not get good care at your hospital, that would almost always be a legitimate reason for action against you. Here are a few real life examples: “We were so understaffed it was scary” or “If another person comes into the ER just to get narcs, I might punch them out” or “I got so frustrated with one patient I wanted to take her call light away”.
Yeah, we’ve all had feelings like that, and we might say them to a real friend face to face - but posting them online for all to see - and, no matter what your privacy settings are, it really is for all to see - is just foolish. Save those rants for your truly private conversations.
]]>They compared staffing factors and patient outcomes at 56 so-called “Magnet” hospitals with 508 other hospitals across four US states.
The Magnet Recognition Program is a voluntarycertification programme overseen by the American Nurses Association. Its hospitals are recognised for their nursing excellence and practice innovation as well as for having higher levels of job satisfaction and less burnout.
The researchers found the Magnet hospitals had slightly higher nurse-to-patient ratios and used fewer temporary staff. They were also rated as having significantly better work environments and had more nurses with degreesand more with specialisms.
Analysis of more than 600,000 surgical patients revealed that mortality rates were 20% lower at Magnet hospitals and they also had better performance on “failure to rescue”.
Of the surgical patients in Magnet hospitals, 1.5% died within 30 days compared with 1.8% in non-Magnet hospitals. In addition, 3.8% of the surgical patients with complications died in Magnet hospitals compared with 4.6% in other hospitals.
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In order to find the career that’s right for you, you need to analyze your work skills and learning style, define your true interests, and reassess your economic expectations. Here are some tips on how to make it happen!
Match Your Interests, Skills
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You need to know your true interests before you make a career decision. Career experts believe matching your interests to actual job tasks is most fulfilling long-term. But knowing your interests is harder than it seems. Many have a ready-set list of things they do or don’t like without fully examining why they feel this way in the first place. For example, many confuse their enjoyment of shopping with the ability to become a clothing designer. It’s possible a shopper can learn how to become a designer, but the part of shopping that engages her might be the research involved and not the clothes. She might have terrible aesthetic sense but an astute business capacity. Essentially, people need to make an honest personal assessment to know what they want.
In order to know your career competency, you also need to assess the level of your current skills. Meeting with a career counselor, taking aptitude tests, or seeking advice from an industry expert will help you find out. You can then figure out how to improve your skills through education.
Before you pick a school, you need to determine the type of learning style that best suits you. Education experts have found that the three most common ways of learning are auditory, experiential, and visual. Knowing which way you learn will help you learn new concepts most effectively and maximize your time in school. It will also help you determine your job suitability. A visual learner is more likely to find architecture or design work more fulfilling and fun.
]]>Economist Neil Howe says that only 5% of people pick the right job on the first try. He calls those people “fast starters” and in general, they are less creative, less adventurous, and less innovative, which makes a conventional, common path work well for them. So it’s questionable whether you should even aspire to be one of those people who picks right the first try. But, that said, we all still want to be good at choosing paths for ourselves. So, here are some guidelines to think about—whether it’s our first career or our fifth career.
We have a grass-is-greener approach to professions that are not our own. For example, this award-winnng video from Chipotle about farmers becoming more animal-friendly pretends that it’s just a mental and emotional evolution for farmers to realize that going back to nature, and being good to animals, is what feels best, so they should do it. It’s so easy, for example, to take the pigs out of an assembly line.
The Chipotle video is total crap, to be honest. It’s not that farmers don’t know that pigs on pasture is nicer. It’s that there is no market for pigs on pasture because consumers won’t pay enough to eat humane meat (without farrowing crates, for example, pork prices would quadruple). So the idea that being a farmer is so beautiful and back-to-the land is just absurd. Being a farmer is actually really complicated, hard entrepreneurial work with very low wages.
Another example of a hyped up job is a lawyer. You see their exciting life on TV: a gloriously safe path from college to law school to a high paying job. But behind the scenes, each year the American Bar Association conducts a survey to ask if lawyers would recommend their profession to other people, and the vast majority of lawyers say no.
Pick a Lifestyle, Not a Job Title
Look at the lives you see people having, and ask yourself whose life you would want. That’s easy, right? But now look deeper. You can’t just have the life they have now. You have to have the life they lead to get there. So, Taylor Swift has had great success, and now she gets to pretty much do whatever she wants. But could you do what she did to get there? She had her whole family relocate so she could pursue her dreams in Nashville. Do you want a life of such high-stakes, singular commitment?
Look at the successful writers you read. Most of them wrote for years in obscurity, risking long-term financial doom in order to keep writing. Do you really want that path for yourself? Marylou Kelly Streznewski, author of Gifted Grownups, finds that most people who are exceptionally creative have to give up almost everything else in order to pursue “creativity with a big C.” For most people, that path is not appealing.
The same is true for startup founders. It’s a terrible life, to be honest. Your finances will be ruined, you won’t have time for anything else in your life, and your company will probably fail. So when you decide you want to do a startup, look at the life the person had before their company got stable. Most people would want to run their own, well-funded company and control their own hours. Very few people would want the life you have to live to get to that point.
Don’t Overcommit
Testing out lots of different jobs is a great idea. Job hopping is the sign of someone who is genuinely trying to figure out where they fit. Quitting when you know you’re in the wrong spot is a natural way to find the right spot. A resume with lots of wrong turns is not cataclysmic. You can hire a good resume writer to fix the resume so it looks like you actually had focus and purpose. (Really, I rewrite peoples’ resumes all the time. It’s about telling a story and everyone has a way to tell a good story about their career no matter how many times they’ve changed jobs.)
The important thing is to not overcommit to one path. Graduate school, for example, is overcommiting because if you don’t end up liking that field, you will have spent four years gaining entrance into the field. Taking on college debt is overcommitting because you are, effectively, saying you will ony take jobs that are relatively high paying in order to service the debt.
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Do you remember the wooden labyrinth game from childhood? Or maybe you even still have one. It’s that game in which you move a metal ball around a maze without letting it fall into any of the holes. Knowing the path to the finish is clearly not enough – there are those darned holes that you need to get around! Attaining your goals is a lot like that game. You might know some good advice about how to open your own business, lose weight, or develop a loving relationship; but, ultimately, success is in how you negotiate obstacles and pitfalls.
Success – in both the game and in your endeavors to meet your goals – is dependent upon knowing the “field” (the best route to your personal finish line) and knowing how to move through it. The path is something you get to know by thinking critically about your circumstance so that you can learn to manage problems and move toward your goal. For instance, losing weight will likely include some change in diet and regular exercise. Finding the love of your life might include efforts at self-improvement and/or finding out where you can meet potential partners. You can learn more about these kinds of solutions by googling the topic, finding related self-help materials, or talking with friends.
The next step of actually following through with your plans is much trickier – like trying to successfully roll that ball through the maze. The best way to do this is by developing compassionate self-awareness – a combination of self-awareness and self-compassion.
In the section below, I address how you can increase self-awareness. Consider each suggestion, working on one at a time. You can do this by either thinking in-depth about the topic, journaling about it, and/or talking with someone you trust.
Pay attention to your thoughts. People’s thoughts flow almost continuously throughout the day. So, knowing and understanding yourself requires that you be mindful of them. To do this, make it a point to occasionally make note of your thoughts through the day. You might find it helpful to do this at particular times, such as when you are driving to work or preparing dinner. You might also find it enlightening to attend to your thoughts when you are particularly distressed. Listen to them as you would listen to someone else talking. You might notice particular themes in content or ways of thinking (e.g. being optimistic/pessimistic, rambling/focused). At this point, you don’t need to try to change anything: just observing is a big enough step.
Your thoughts about you, others, and the world are guided by your beliefs. For instance, if you believe that people will take advantage of others whenever they get a chance, your thoughts will be filled with suspicions about how they might be doing this to you. Or, if you believe that you are somehow flawed or inadequate, many of your thoughts will be related to these self-perceptions. As you make the effort to attend to your thoughts, your underlying beliefs might become apparent.
Pay attention to your feelings. Your emotions are as much a part of you as your thoughts. While thoughts can affect your emotions, emotions can also very much affect your thoughts. For instance, your suspicions that your boyfriend is cheating on you will likely leave you feeling angry, hurt, and sad. And, continuing to carry feelings of being betrayed from a previous relationship might lead you to be more suspicious of your current boyfriend’s actions. Of course, this can also affect your behavior; perhaps leading you to check his text messages or snoop in his jacket pockets.
Just as with your thoughts, you want to just pay attention to your feelings without the intention of trying to change them (be mindful of them). Practice being aware of your emotions, as well as identifying them. And, observe the consequences of your emotions, such as how it affects your thoughts and behaviors.
When you struggle with being critical of yourself, it might be helpful to imagine a child in a similar situation; and how you would respond. For instance, you might be stressed at work and angry with yourself for not doing as well as you’d like. If you cannot stop beating yourself up, you might want to consider how you would respond to a child who was struggling at school. Would you tell her what a failure she is? Would you berate her for not being smart or capable? Or, would you wrap your arms around her and tell her you care, letting her know that you are there to help? If you treated her the way you treat yourself, she would certainly feel worse about her situation and herself. However, you probably wouldn’t do that. Instead, your actions would be more similar to the second option. And, as a result, she would eventually stop crying and, even though she still had a problem, at least feel loved, hopeful, and supported in trying hard again.
]]>In the dozen years that followed (until my birth), she wore a blue flannel cape and a starched white cap while presiding over the preemie nursery at Lenox Hill, long before the days of neonatal intensive care units. The glory years for nurses, my mother always told me, were during World War II, when most of the doctors were away and real responsibility replaced being a handmaiden.
With this as my background, I am hardly a disinterested reviewer of a new anthology of essays by 21 nurses. It is beautifully wrought, but more significantly a reminder that these “semi-invisible” people, as Lee Gutkind calls them in this new book, are now the “indispensable and anchoring element of our health care system.”
Today, there are 2.7 million registered nurses working in the United States, compared with 690,000 physicians and surgeons. That number is expected to grow to 3.5 million in the next half dozen years, Mr. Gutkind writes in his introduction, as members of the baby boom generation require hospitalization and home or hospice care.
After he had selected 21 essays from more than 200 submissions, Mr. Gutkind had personal experiences that drove home the very thing the nurses wrote about over and over. He spent several months at others’ hospital bedsides — his mother, 93; his son, 21; his uncle, 86; and a friend, 72 — and rarely saw a physician.
Though it is the doctors who are considered “deities,” he writes, it was the “irreplaceable” nurses who were a source of comfort and security during his family’s multiple trials. And yet by his own admission he took them for granted — “I cannot not tell you what any of the nurses looked like, what their names were, where they came from” — which is exactly the state of affairs my mother described 65 years ago.
She would have loved this book, and no passage more than the one in which Tilda Shalof, a nurse for 30 years and also a best-selling author, describes “the ongoing tension between the university-educated nurses like me and the old guard, the hospital-trained, diploma-prepared nurses.”
The latter, she argues, are preferable. “Maybe those veterans didn’t know much about research or nursing theories, but they sure know how to care for patients,” she writes. “They knew how to get the job done. I wanted to be like them — a nurse who could start IVs on anyone.”
Many of the nurses who have contributed to this anthology are also part-time writers or bloggers. I would have welcomed some information from Mr. Gutkind, the editor of a literary magazine and writer in residence at Arizona State University, about whether nurse/writers are common and if so why. Perhaps many of them write because they rarely talk about their work, as they point out in these essays, and are encouraged in training and by the medical hierarchy to be tentative, even submissive, in their communication with doctors.
Several of the essayists describe their duties as tedious but the implications as profound. Eddie Lueken, a nurse of 30 years who also has a master of fine arts in creative writing, described her student years, earning tuition money busing tables at a steakhouse where she had to wear a cowboy hat and went home smelling like A.1. sauce. She yearned for the adrenaline rush of paddling people back to life; instead, she wound up mastering bedmaking, denture care for the terminally ill and measuring the diameter of bed sores.
]]>So why in the world did I opt for a BSN degree? Because I wanted to keep my options open. My mother had been a nurse before me, and always told me that advanced education was the key to advancement. She was right.
Push Toward Advanced Education
In the years since I’ve graduated, nursing has become an increasingly complex profession. Patients today present to hospitals and nursing homes with a multitude of health problems, as well as a vast array of socioeconomic concerns. Nurses now understand that a basic understanding of the patient’s environment and current health policy goes a long way toward helping patients achieve good health, and these days national nursing organizations and healthcare employers almost universally recognize the role nursing education plays in preparing nurses to work in our current healthcare system.
The American Nurses Association still believes that the BSN degree should be the minimum degree required for entry into the profession. Others have since added their voices to the chorus. In 2011, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its report The Future of Nursing, and stated that “The ways in which nurses were educated during the 20th century are no longer adequate for dealing with the realities of health care in the 21st century.” Today’s nurses need education in “leadership, health policy, system improvement, research and evidence-based practice, and teamwork and collaboration” - topics routinely covered at the BSN level. That’s why the IOM recommends increasing the proportion of BSN nurses in the workforce to 80 percent by 2020. (The number of BSN-prepared nurses currently hovers around 37 percent.)
Many states agree, at least in principle, with the IOM’s recommendation. At least two states, New York and New Jersey, are currently considering BSN-in-10 legislation, which would require nurses to obtain their BSN degrees within 10 years of licensure as a Registered Nurse.
The Maternity Center Association of New York City began the first U.S. nurse-midwifery education program for public health nurses in 1932. By the mid-1970s, nurse-midwives had become a popular option for women seeking a less clinical, more “natural” maternal experience. Today, nurse-midwives incorporate best practices from English midwifery, American nursing and Western medicine to span traditional hospital-based care through family planning and increasingly popular home-based childbirth.
What is Midwifery?
As defined by the American College of Nurse-Midwives, it is:
“the independent management of women’s health care, focusing particularly on common primary care issues, family planning and gynecologic needs of women, pregnancy, childbirth, the postpartum period and the care of the newborn.”
A certified nurse-midwife is educated in the two disciplines of nursing and midwifery and practices according to ACNM standards. IThey offer highly personalized care, and encourage activities that promote women’s health and reduce health risks.
Midwives believe that birth, puberty and menopause are normal processes in a woman’s life-- not conditions that need to be “fixed,” but rather ones that women should be educated about, so that they can make their own informed health decisions.
Studies over the last several decades confirm that nurse-midwives can manage most perinatal, family planning and gynecological needs of women. They have become an especially vital health care link for underserved women in rural and inner-city areas. The National Institute of Medicine recently recommended that nurse-midwives be given more responsibility for delivering women’s health care.
Environment
Certified nurse-midwives work in individuals’ homes, private practices (either alone or with a physician, usually an OB/GYN), public clinics, hospitals and birth centers. When necessary, CNMs refer women to specialists, such as in the case of a high-risk pregnancy or a pregnant patient with multiple chronic diseases.
]]>My mom was a nurse, so I knew something about the profession. Her nursing magazines lay around our house, and I’d pick them up and read them when I ran out of text on the back of the breakfast cereal box. Some of the stories were pretty interesting. So between my freshman and sophomore years of college, a friend and I enrolled in a nurses’ aide course.
My friend, a doctor-to-be, wanted the health-care experience; I figured the class was a chance to explore the world of nursing while earning money for college. (At that time, many nursing homes still paid students to obtain their nurses’ aide certifications, on the condition that the new aides work for the nursing home after graduation.)
If I liked the class, I told myself, I’d major in nursing. After all, it was a stable, respectable, in-demand profession—and as a recently-engaged, soon-to-be-Marine-bride, I knew I needed a profession that would travel well.
People, Not Procedures
To be honest, the class wasn’t always exciting. We learned how to make beds! (And actually took a test to demonstrate our competency.) But we also learned about diseases, dementia and documentation. We learned how to assess vital signs, how to help patients with activities of daily living, and how to communicate to our supervising nurses. Before long, we were released onto the floor to practice our new skills—and that’s when things got interesting.
Nursing, I learned, is not about the rote application of procedures; nursing is about people. Out on the floor, I worked with a 90-year-old woman who’d come over on a boat from the Old Country, alone, at the age of 13. I cared for a man who’d reverted to his native language, and quickly learned that I could ease his confusion by telling him “Guten Nacht” ("good night") before tucking him into bed.
]]>Here are 5 concrete things you can do to boost your happiness score:
Hang out with happy people. It rubs off.
Cultivate an attitude of appreciation. Begin to notice the positive moments and events of your day. Write down three to five positive events/experiences each evening. Even fleeting moments of joy count here! Keep the list daily for at least two weeks and you are likely to notice a change in your happiness. Then continue on - gratitude and appreciation are proven paths to happiness.
Live in the moment. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow is tomorrow. You only have right now. Enjoy the “now.”
Decide to be happy and act that way. Do it again tomorrow. Over time you will build new pathways in your brain and it will be easier to control your mood. What are you waiting for?