I started my nursing career off with an ADN. Having started off in the hospital, I quickly became disillusioned with the profit-orientation. It was nothing like it seems to be now, but enough for me to decide that I didn't want to have any part of it. The home health heyday was still underway (pre-regulation) and I moved into home care because of the ability to manage my own time and provide quality care. At this point, I was already working with high school students interested in health professions, and teaching patients in their homes pushed me toward nursing education. Of course, I would need a masters degree for that, and I didn't even have a bachelor's (had a BS, but not in nursing). I found a program that had a bridge and enrolled in a MSN program, so my transition to a professional degree skipped over the baccalaureate level and the hospital experience and went straight into nursing education teaching in an ADN program.
Years earlier, when enrolled in an ADN program as a student, I had joked with classmates about the lack of practicality involved with our education. They talked about theory and textbook nursing care, but when we went to clinicals we saw a very different real-world focus. I appreciated theory as much as the next person, but lacking an emphasis on practicality, theory can be almost misleading. Nursing students need to be prepared to apply theory in the atheoretical and market-driven world of healthcare. I had been entirely unprepared for the challenges I would face as a nurse and concentrated my teaching on making sure that my students were armed with the tools to provide excellent care in a culture more concerned with efficiency than excellence. Of course, I've sinced recognized that I no longer possess the expertise to prepare students for modern healthcare, but have since gained the expertise to prepare nurse educators for much the same problems that nurses face.
What floored me was the difference between the way I was treated one week, without an MSN, and the next week when I had a new abbreviation after my name. Don't get me wrong, I evolved in my MSN program. I went from a short-sighted focus on symptoms and tasks to a broader understanding of health care and nursing as a contextalized system. Yet it seemed odd that the change was so sudden, and that I immediately became someone worth listening to. Of course, now I know, that's how things work: Professional respect requires professional credentials. It's silly, but it happens at every level. Even now, I face some professional disdain because I chose to get a doctoral degree in education rather than nursing. This is one of the reasons that nursing programs have taken to issuing specific courses on transitioning to professional nursing, because it's often not a transition at all so much as a switch that is turned from off to on.
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I had no idea that you were persuing a PhD in education instead of nursing.
ReplyDeleteMy mentor wants me to continue my education, at least, to the Master's level, but I am not interested in a Master's Degree in Nursing. I'm thinking of working on an MBA, once this is done.
As a higher level Nurse, what would you suggest? I think the business masters would be more helpful in future navigation through the business side of nursing and politics.
It depends on what you want to do with your degree. I went for the educational doctorate because I found that more of my questions as a nurse educator dealt with how to teach nurses rather than nursing theory itself. (Also, at the time I was considering doctoral programs, nursing was just overcoming the 'theory-envy' that defined nursing science throughout the 80s and 90s - I wanted no part of that.) If you want to continue to work in a hospital setting, and MBA or a Masters in healthcare administration or something along those lines might work for you. Think about the type of job you want and see what sort of credentials that those jobs require. That's a good place to start.
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