Category Archives: Nursing

04/8/14

And just like that, everything changed.

But perhaps it didn’t. Maybe, I just didn’t see things as clearly as I once thought.

I didn’t get into the UBC School of Nursing. Although I was close, it wasn’t meant to be.

The last two weeks were extremely stressful while waiting for a response from the school, and it was like a cold bucket of ice water had dropped over me when I received the rejection email. I didn’t know what to think. But then I took a deep breath. Then another.

“What now?”

The question startled me more than I thought. I would apply to other schools. I would apply again next year. These answers, which seemed so sensible before I saw the email suddenly seemed less so. Over the course of the next few days, I pondered on this question quite a bit in a sort of calm, dreamy daze. What did I want out of life?

Did I really want to be a nurse in the first place? No, I didn’t. I always felt it was a means to an end. A profession that would help me achieve what it was I really wanted.

So what did I want? I still don’t have a concrete answer to that question. I think I’ll spend my entire life answering that one.

What I did know was that a year ago, I would have been aghast at this turn of events. But this was a year later, and I was a different person. Looking back at my last five years at UBC, I knew that each year made me who I am; those were years I would never take back. Nothing was wasted. But my time with academics had to come to an end. That much was certain.

There is so much that school cannot teach me. There is so much to learn in this grand world we live in – I have yet to experience even a small taste of it. I may not know where I’m going now, but I know that I want to try new things, learn, and build my experiences into something I can be proud of. This determination and passion is what I have fostered in my years at UBC.

So what do I want? What do I know after all these years?

I love to travel.

I have an avid interest in the social determinants of health and mental health.

I work well and love to work with children and youth.

I am a complete people person. I need that face-to-face interaction. I want to build community.

I am a firm believer in self-empowerment through community and activity as a means of social change.

Having loved ones near me and being a part of a community is very important to me.

These are the things I have learned among many others. These are the precious gems I take with me as I build on myself. These are what I need to keep in mind – reflect on – as I march onward.

Everything changed and nothing did. I am still on the same journey – but taking the longer, winding road.

12/18/13

My next step.

When I made the decision to take an extra semester or more in my degree, I wasn’t sure what I would be doing with it. I just knew that I needed some more time to think over where I was going in life.

My decision to apply for nursing school came in a conversation I had with a good friend during the beginning of summer. She acted as my soundboard of sorts, asking me simple yet crucial questions that we all have to ask ourselves at some point in our lives.

Do I want to work with people?

Do I want to work on the ground or behind the scenes?

Where do I want to live?

What am I getting out of my degree now and how do I want to use that in the future?

I had been struggling to figure out how I could practically apply what I learned in my undergrad to what I wanted to do with my life, but I was left with more uncertainty than anything. In all honesty, after I had come back from volunteering in India, I felt that I had little to offer in terms of practical skill. At least in terms of what I wanted accomplish.

Nursing came up in our conversation just offhand, but the idea stuck with me. I had to laugh because I had spent much of my studies exploring alternative, more holistic models to the dominant biomedical model of health and now I had come back full circle. The decision to become a nurse just made sense with my goal of understanding and being able to better human health at a large scale – it was the missing piece of the puzzle that I couldn’t keep ignoring. Biomedicine was dominant in terms of healthcare for a reason and I was going to learn to play the game. I wanted to blend what I learned about holistic health through my studies with the world of biomedicine to ultimately create a larger picture of health and wellness.

I took a long time to play with the idea of nursing school. What were my other options? What did a nurse really do? Why a nurse and not a doctor? Would nursing really broaden my horizons as technical and practical as it was? In the end, it was how I perceived nursing to fit into everything I had learned at this point. Nursing would provide me with practical skills to offer not just locally but in demand internationally. It had flexible enough hours to sustain a well-balanced life and dealt with much one-on-one care with patients. Both of these points contrasted the long hours and little patient-time experienced by doctors. Ultimately, I foresaw that nursing would become my medium for applying what I learned about development and global (public) health in my undergrad. I would be more than just a simple nurse. And with the flexibility in different career paths as a nurse, I felt that a lot of doors would open for me through becoming a nurse.

So here I am many months later, finishing up my prerequisites for nursing school. I still question if this is the right decision but then I tell myself that I have no way of knowing that. All I know is that I feel that it is a step in the right direction. At least for now. Life can swerve you in all sorts of directions after all. All I can really do is keep marching forward always absorbing, reflecting, and communicating.