“Oh, the places you’ll go. You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own and you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.”
— Dr. Seuss

It’s one thing to receive the calling to become a nurse. It’s quite another to make it through nursing school and enter the challenging world of health care practice. This month, Pulse talked to six nurses, who have been working for a year, to learn how they had made the transition from student to professional nurse.

Their stories may bring back memories to those of you who made that same transition years ago. If you’re about to start your career, we believe you’ll find their experiences helpful.

I was encouraged to learn that despite the nitty-gritty details of the daily grind, these nurses are more comfortable and confident in the workplace after a year and have every intention of staying in the field. They have aspirations of assuming leadership roles and going back to school to learn new roles.

They not only have an understanding of the opportunities that a nursing career offers them, but an appreciation of those who have gone before them to make the profession what it is today.

Like most hospital units, the staff at the gynecology/urology surgical unit at Emory University Hospital is multigenerational.

“My preceptors have also been excellent role models,” said nurse Emily Mason. “I love hearing these veteran nurses talk about the days when they had to sharpen their needles and mix their own antibiotics, and learn how nurses acquired greater responsibility for patient assessment and care. It’s nice to have these reminders of how women and nurses in our society have
taken on more. But we’re a team. They feed off our enthusiasm and energy and, in turn, we gain so much from them.”

Switching from fresh nurse voices, Pulse talked to professionals with many years of experience who are putting their skills and knowledge to work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Whenever you read news about homeland security and biological warfare, an outbreak of SARS or a shortage of flu vaccine, you can be sure that the CDC is involved. What you may not know is that sometimes the person who is investigating, analyzing data, writing policy and teaching the public is a nurse.

A nurse and educator, Joyce Murray is also director of the Carter Center’s Ethiopia Public Health Training Initiative. “You don’t hear as much about this quiet, ongoing project as you do about the efforts to eradicate Guinea worm or other diseases,” Murray said, “but President [Jimmy] Carter has a great attachment to this program and wants it to succeed.” The initiative serves as a model of how to help people help themselves.

Nurse administrator Carolyn Drumm gives readers a behind-thescene look at the birth of a new hospital, DeKalb Medical Center at Hillandale, which opens in Lithonia next month. Sandra Harman, RN, C, CEAP, explains the need and purpose of a
new mental health nursing specialty, employee assistance programs.

The variety of jobs and the shoes nurses fill continues to amaze me. Keep the stories coming, and take some time
for fun this summer.