Just a quick post, like any others I add for the next few months will also probably have to be.
I'm just past halfway in my first semester of nursing school. Everything's going really well, and the program is turning out to be all that I expected and more. It's been a really great confirmation that this is the right thing for me to be doing right now.
I've been pretty busy, but I've been able to find moments and windows of time to relax and recuperate along the way too. My five classes are spread across Mon through Thu, which *sounds* like a nice 3-day weekend every week. Actually, though, almost all of my Fridays so far have been filled with homework and group projects etc.
My classes are:
Pharmacology - all about different medications and how they move around in, are processed by, exert their effect on, and leave the body.
Fundamentals w/lab - All the core "nursy" stuff like checking people's blood pressure, putting in catheters, and analyzing poop. Ah, the glamour of being human...
Communication - just what it says, but focused on nursing. How to communicate effectively and therapeutically within the nurse-patient relationship, in contrast with social communication.
Multicultural/Community Health - Again, pretty much self-explanatory. Nursing that focuses on the community as a whole and on how the community as a whole affects the health of families and individuals. Nursily kicking ass on a large scale.
Nursing Theory - Discusses a number of different ways of thinking about the four domains of nursing (the areas to which nursing science applies): Health, Person, Environment, and Nursing itself.
All good stuff, in unequal ways.
I'm applying to be the Web Coordinator on the Board of the Student Nurses' Association @ UP. If I get it I'll be responsible for our facebook account, our blog, and some portion of email communications to/from the Board.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
A rant (AKA my monthly post)
An email I sent to a local radio station that hosted an Election Night party I attended:
--
Hi,
I'd like to offer some thoughts on your Election Night event
at Grand Central Bowling:
First, a little background... before that night, I had never listened to (or, really, even heard about) AM 970 or to the Rick Emerson show. I came to Grand Central as a result of seeing WW ads and deciding that of the parties I knew about, it looked like the biggest. The presence of Rick Emerson, Storm Large, and anybody else was very much secondary to the obvious main event: the election.
My first introduction to your station and to the Rick Emerson show (not including the table with station-branded schwag) was when most of the TVs upstairs suddenly changed from nail-biting (but increasingly celebratory) election coverage, complete with graphics, maps, stats visually displayed. The new view was of a table with a few people I had never seen or heard of before talking to each other.
I'm sure this part was unintentional, but at this point the audio was still coming from CNN. That meant that we could still barely make out CNN audio over the din of the crowd, but all we could see were these random people talking and laughing with each other. After about 5 minutes of this, I waded through the masses to your table
downstairs to let them know "WTF??" They got right on it and soon we were no longer hearing CNN.
What we began to [barely] hear then, were these [still unknown] people talking to each other. Because of the noise of the party, we couldn't hear what they were saying, except to be able to tell that these people were periodically looking at CNN on a screen next to them (which all of us had been perfectly happy watching for ourselves until the picture changed) and telling us what was going on (again, instead of LETTING US WATCH IT OURSELVES). Once again, we couldn't actually hear WTF they were saying, so the net effect of all this was to reduce the information available for the mob of desperate Obama hopefuls down to nearly zero.
I'm sure you must have heard our chants of "C-N-N! C-N-N!" pretty quickly after that. We had come there to WATCH THE ELECTION but now had less information than we would have had if we had just stayed home. Everyone upstairs was looking at each other in disbelief at how poorly planned the decision to put these people on had been. Our indignation and anger (at the only entity we knew of to blame...
the station whose logo was prominently displayed on the screen that we so fiercely wanted to go away) subsided when the channel was turned back to CNN. We assumed that whoever was to blame for such an out-of-touch choice to cut off the flow of information to people who were relying on it like oxygen had wised up.
Despite that initial resounding democratic uprising, though, we found ourselves faced with periodic returns to these people talking, which included each time being unable to hear what they were saying as well as being suddenly and unexpectedly cut off from incoming election news -- the one thing we all needed.
By far worst of all, though, was when your people were yakking unintelligibly at and several minutes beyond the moment when the race was called for Barack Obama. The moment that should have been a massive wave of celebration, the moment probably everyone in the whole building had been waiting for for 8 years was kept from us by (in at least our opinion during those moments) these idiot talking heads and the idiotic radio station that put them there.
I am completely serious when I say that I think that if your people would have continued this mistake, there may have been violence and destruction in Grand Central that night. The annoyance and frustration we had all felt during earlier interruptions quickly began to turn to blinding fury. The mob upstairs was literally ready to come down there and break down the wall if need be to get the people there to shut the hell up and let us see the results so we could celebrate.
Finally, the picture was changed back (since I couldn't hear anything the radio hosts were saying, I still don't know if the channel was changed each time in response to our anger or if the hosts just obliviously finished their spiel as planned). The celebration began, and the rest of the night is history.
But you need to know a couple of things:
1. The wave of celebration that swept the entire planet when Obama was declared the winner was reduced to a trickle in one bowling alley in SE Portland by what felt (and still feels) like an arbitrary restriction of the flow of information. The surge of joy everyone else was able to feel together was for us only the slightest whimper of hope that spread slowly through the bar, and for us this hope quickly turned to rabid anger at the ineptitude of whoever was preventing us from sharing this experience.
Of course I'm not trying to say that you ruined my (or "our") whole night -- the election of Barack Obama as President is the highlight of my political life so far -- but truly your incompetence tarnished the initial moments of the experience for a lot of people.
2. As I mentioned earlier, I had previously had zero exposure to AM 970, and had no opinion of the station. Perhaps you have great shows/hosts/guests or whatever, but after that night (and I think I speak for more people than just myself), all I feel toward your station is resentment. Whoever planned the portions of the night's
event that went so wrong did your brand no favors.
Suggestions:
1. Pick a better location. For what your station apparently wanted to do, I think Grand Central was the wrong place. For the festivities to have successfully involved a live radio show, I think we would have needed to be gathered more centrally in a single room so that we could at the very minimum be prepared for when the attention was going to be directed elsewhere. As it was, every time the channel
went to the radio people, it seemed random, inexplicable, and arbitrary.
2. Be realistic about the crowd. I don't think there was any way you could have interrupted the graphic data displays of the news networks without pissing a bunch of people off, especially considering the fact that the noise level in the bar made it impossible to hear what the radio people were saying. I really think the only way it MIGHT have worked would have been if we could have seen and heard you without
losing our ability to keep an eye on displays of incoming election news.
3. Be more nimble and in-touch with the needs of the crowd when a story is as rapidly developing and emotionally involving as elections are, and especially as this particular election was. This was a situation that required nearly instantaneous reaction to breaking news, and what you provided instead was ponderous, irrelevant, and inaudible. Perhaps the radio hosts are unable to talk and conduct their show while simultaneously keeping tabs on ongoing developments.
If that's so, though, you need to have someone whose responsibility it is to closely monitor for updates and bust in and tell the hosts to STFU when, for example, the news comes out that WE HAVE A NEW PRESIDENT, AND IT'S THE GOOD GUY. That isn't the kind of thing that can wait a few minutes while some radio host finishes his
oh-so-witty-and-erudite point about whatever the hell he's talking about.
Besides the lacking responsiveness to breaking news, the talk show portions could have gone a LONG way toward connecting positively with the crowd if they had a) talked only during commercial breaks or whatever and b) COMMUNICATED that... I dunno, put a damn sign up behind the hosts that says "we'll return to CNN when they return from break" or whatever. Just randomly switching over to something we can't
hear (except to be able to tell that the hosts are reading stuff off of the CNN screen they're reading... talk about adding insult to injury!) is FAR from acceptable.
Okay, I'm done with my rant. I'm not sure what I "want" in response to this email. I guess at minimum it would be nice to be able to know that the people responsible for planning the night have actually read my email. If one of them were to elaborate along the lines of "yeah, we really screwed some things up that night, and we learned some lessons for next time" I could gain a lot of respect back, and would MAYBE even consider going to a future 970 AM-sponsored event. Maybe.
Thanks for your time.
Jason
--
Hi,
I'd like to offer some thoughts on your Election Night event
at Grand Central Bowling:
First, a little background... before that night, I had never listened to (or, really, even heard about) AM 970 or to the Rick Emerson show. I came to Grand Central as a result of seeing WW ads and deciding that of the parties I knew about, it looked like the biggest. The presence of Rick Emerson, Storm Large, and anybody else was very much secondary to the obvious main event: the election.
My first introduction to your station and to the Rick Emerson show (not including the table with station-branded schwag) was when most of the TVs upstairs suddenly changed from nail-biting (but increasingly celebratory) election coverage, complete with graphics, maps, stats visually displayed. The new view was of a table with a few people I had never seen or heard of before talking to each other.
I'm sure this part was unintentional, but at this point the audio was still coming from CNN. That meant that we could still barely make out CNN audio over the din of the crowd, but all we could see were these random people talking and laughing with each other. After about 5 minutes of this, I waded through the masses to your table
downstairs to let them know "WTF??" They got right on it and soon we were no longer hearing CNN.
What we began to [barely] hear then, were these [still unknown] people talking to each other. Because of the noise of the party, we couldn't hear what they were saying, except to be able to tell that these people were periodically looking at CNN on a screen next to them (which all of us had been perfectly happy watching for ourselves until the picture changed) and telling us what was going on (again, instead of LETTING US WATCH IT OURSELVES). Once again, we couldn't actually hear WTF they were saying, so the net effect of all this was to reduce the information available for the mob of desperate Obama hopefuls down to nearly zero.
I'm sure you must have heard our chants of "C-N-N! C-N-N!" pretty quickly after that. We had come there to WATCH THE ELECTION but now had less information than we would have had if we had just stayed home. Everyone upstairs was looking at each other in disbelief at how poorly planned the decision to put these people on had been. Our indignation and anger (at the only entity we knew of to blame...
the station whose logo was prominently displayed on the screen that we so fiercely wanted to go away) subsided when the channel was turned back to CNN. We assumed that whoever was to blame for such an out-of-touch choice to cut off the flow of information to people who were relying on it like oxygen had wised up.
Despite that initial resounding democratic uprising, though, we found ourselves faced with periodic returns to these people talking, which included each time being unable to hear what they were saying as well as being suddenly and unexpectedly cut off from incoming election news -- the one thing we all needed.
By far worst of all, though, was when your people were yakking unintelligibly at and several minutes beyond the moment when the race was called for Barack Obama. The moment that should have been a massive wave of celebration, the moment probably everyone in the whole building had been waiting for for 8 years was kept from us by (in at least our opinion during those moments) these idiot talking heads and the idiotic radio station that put them there.
I am completely serious when I say that I think that if your people would have continued this mistake, there may have been violence and destruction in Grand Central that night. The annoyance and frustration we had all felt during earlier interruptions quickly began to turn to blinding fury. The mob upstairs was literally ready to come down there and break down the wall if need be to get the people there to shut the hell up and let us see the results so we could celebrate.
Finally, the picture was changed back (since I couldn't hear anything the radio hosts were saying, I still don't know if the channel was changed each time in response to our anger or if the hosts just obliviously finished their spiel as planned). The celebration began, and the rest of the night is history.
But you need to know a couple of things:
1. The wave of celebration that swept the entire planet when Obama was declared the winner was reduced to a trickle in one bowling alley in SE Portland by what felt (and still feels) like an arbitrary restriction of the flow of information. The surge of joy everyone else was able to feel together was for us only the slightest whimper of hope that spread slowly through the bar, and for us this hope quickly turned to rabid anger at the ineptitude of whoever was preventing us from sharing this experience.
Of course I'm not trying to say that you ruined my (or "our") whole night -- the election of Barack Obama as President is the highlight of my political life so far -- but truly your incompetence tarnished the initial moments of the experience for a lot of people.
2. As I mentioned earlier, I had previously had zero exposure to AM 970, and had no opinion of the station. Perhaps you have great shows/hosts/guests or whatever, but after that night (and I think I speak for more people than just myself), all I feel toward your station is resentment. Whoever planned the portions of the night's
event that went so wrong did your brand no favors.
Suggestions:
1. Pick a better location. For what your station apparently wanted to do, I think Grand Central was the wrong place. For the festivities to have successfully involved a live radio show, I think we would have needed to be gathered more centrally in a single room so that we could at the very minimum be prepared for when the attention was going to be directed elsewhere. As it was, every time the channel
went to the radio people, it seemed random, inexplicable, and arbitrary.
2. Be realistic about the crowd. I don't think there was any way you could have interrupted the graphic data displays of the news networks without pissing a bunch of people off, especially considering the fact that the noise level in the bar made it impossible to hear what the radio people were saying. I really think the only way it MIGHT have worked would have been if we could have seen and heard you without
losing our ability to keep an eye on displays of incoming election news.
3. Be more nimble and in-touch with the needs of the crowd when a story is as rapidly developing and emotionally involving as elections are, and especially as this particular election was. This was a situation that required nearly instantaneous reaction to breaking news, and what you provided instead was ponderous, irrelevant, and inaudible. Perhaps the radio hosts are unable to talk and conduct their show while simultaneously keeping tabs on ongoing developments.
If that's so, though, you need to have someone whose responsibility it is to closely monitor for updates and bust in and tell the hosts to STFU when, for example, the news comes out that WE HAVE A NEW PRESIDENT, AND IT'S THE GOOD GUY. That isn't the kind of thing that can wait a few minutes while some radio host finishes his
oh-so-witty-and-erudite point about whatever the hell he's talking about.
Besides the lacking responsiveness to breaking news, the talk show portions could have gone a LONG way toward connecting positively with the crowd if they had a) talked only during commercial breaks or whatever and b) COMMUNICATED that... I dunno, put a damn sign up behind the hosts that says "we'll return to CNN when they return from break" or whatever. Just randomly switching over to something we can't
hear (except to be able to tell that the hosts are reading stuff off of the CNN screen they're reading... talk about adding insult to injury!) is FAR from acceptable.
Okay, I'm done with my rant. I'm not sure what I "want" in response to this email. I guess at minimum it would be nice to be able to know that the people responsible for planning the night have actually read my email. If one of them were to elaborate along the lines of "yeah, we really screwed some things up that night, and we learned some lessons for next time" I could gain a lot of respect back, and would MAYBE even consider going to a future 970 AM-sponsored event. Maybe.
Thanks for your time.
Jason
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
CPR
Gotta jumpstart this blog again. Sorry for the delay... I hope I haven't driven away my millions of faithful readers.
Anyway, I finished my History of the Old Testament class this summer with a fairly mediocre grade. Enough to pass etc, but I was a little too demotivated by the sun etc to really put my heart into it. It's hard not to feel that the rest of my studies now are just a prelude to "real" school, which won't start until January.
I tried to skate by without buying a textbook (so often in online classes I haven't ever used one), but it would have been very helpful in this case. I ended up getting one in time for the final exam, and that was enough to get me through...
I've begun the fall quarter at MHCC and my last two prerequisites:
- World Religions (Independent study) -- Chris Jackson
- Nutrition (Online) -- Jack Brook
World Religions required an orientation last week. There I found out that the entirety of my grade will be based on three progressive exams and one comprehensive plus some worksheets that I turn in each time that I go in for an exam. This is going to work out really well since MHCC is about 30-45 minutes from my house.
The other cool thing about that class is that everything is self-paced. If I wanted to cram for a few days and go take all my exams next week or something, I could be done with the class next week. I don't think I'll do exactly that, but it's nice to have that kind of freedom.
The instructor, Chris Jackson, heads the philosophy department @ MHCC, and seems like a really cool guy. I would love to take more classes from him...
I have no plans to buy a textbook for the World Religions class.
Taking Nutrition online seems to be working okay too, though I will definitely need the textbook I just ordered on Amazon. There are a few more requirements for this class than for World Religions, but nothing too difficult.
I sure do like the online class system at PCC better than this one at MHCC. The PCC version seems a lot more intuitive and better-organized. Maybe it's just me, though.
I confirmed yesterday that my first day of class @ UP will be January 12. Just a little more than 3 months. It's hard to believe it's coming so soon! It seems like such a short time since I took my first prerequisite, before I even knew for sure that I wanted to go into Nursing. I'm feeling pretty intimidated by the UP Nursing program at this point, so I kind of hope the next two years go by as quickly... :)
Anyway, I finished my History of the Old Testament class this summer with a fairly mediocre grade. Enough to pass etc, but I was a little too demotivated by the sun etc to really put my heart into it. It's hard not to feel that the rest of my studies now are just a prelude to "real" school, which won't start until January.
I tried to skate by without buying a textbook (so often in online classes I haven't ever used one), but it would have been very helpful in this case. I ended up getting one in time for the final exam, and that was enough to get me through...
I've begun the fall quarter at MHCC and my last two prerequisites:
- World Religions (Independent study) -- Chris Jackson
- Nutrition (Online) -- Jack Brook
World Religions required an orientation last week. There I found out that the entirety of my grade will be based on three progressive exams and one comprehensive plus some worksheets that I turn in each time that I go in for an exam. This is going to work out really well since MHCC is about 30-45 minutes from my house.
The other cool thing about that class is that everything is self-paced. If I wanted to cram for a few days and go take all my exams next week or something, I could be done with the class next week. I don't think I'll do exactly that, but it's nice to have that kind of freedom.
The instructor, Chris Jackson, heads the philosophy department @ MHCC, and seems like a really cool guy. I would love to take more classes from him...
I have no plans to buy a textbook for the World Religions class.
Taking Nutrition online seems to be working okay too, though I will definitely need the textbook I just ordered on Amazon. There are a few more requirements for this class than for World Religions, but nothing too difficult.
I sure do like the online class system at PCC better than this one at MHCC. The PCC version seems a lot more intuitive and better-organized. Maybe it's just me, though.
I confirmed yesterday that my first day of class @ UP will be January 12. Just a little more than 3 months. It's hard to believe it's coming so soon! It seems like such a short time since I took my first prerequisite, before I even knew for sure that I wanted to go into Nursing. I'm feeling pretty intimidated by the UP Nursing program at this point, so I kind of hope the next two years go by as quickly... :)
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Radiohead!
I saw Radiohead play an amazing show at Auburn, WA last night. I have more to write than I'm able to at the moment, but here's the link to some pics I took.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
I love you Onion
From The Onion:
"40-Foot American Flag Pin Welded To Statue Of Liberty"
There we go -- it didn't seem quite patriotic enough before...
"40-Foot American Flag Pin Welded To Statue Of Liberty"There we go -- it didn't seem quite patriotic enough before...
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Why nursing?, Part 1
I have a wide range of interests and aptitudes in more than one area. Of all the options available to me, why did I choose to go into the nursing field? In no particular order, I'm going to talk about some of the factors that led me to my decision.
Job demand:
The Bureau of Health Professions at the Health Resources and Services Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reports that the US will be short over 1 million RN FTEs by 2020 (scroll down to the bottom of the table for the total), which will mean that projected supply will meet only 64% of 2020's demand.
The picture locally in Oregon is even more stark (see state-by-state breakdowns in the same tables): by 2010, they project that Oregon will be short 5,300 nurses, with 81% of demand filled; in 2015 we'll be down 10,000 nurses at 68% coverage; by 2020, the state will be in need of 15,300 additional nurses and will have only 56% of its needs covered.
This shortage will ensure that for the forseeable future, I shouldn't have any trouble at all with finding a job as an R.N. One downside to this shortage, though, is that it will likely force a larger burden of patient care on nurses that are today often already feeling overworked and underpaid. I imagine this will lead to increasing and increasingly contentious policy confrontations between health care employers and nursing organizations such as unions.
Though these facts do have this negative aspect, overall I'm looking forward to ample job security and the knowledge that with training in such a high-demand field, I will be very valuable to my employer and that I can lend a hand with one of the great health care challenges on the current horizon.
Job demand:
The Bureau of Health Professions at the Health Resources and Services Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reports that the US will be short over 1 million RN FTEs by 2020 (scroll down to the bottom of the table for the total), which will mean that projected supply will meet only 64% of 2020's demand.
The picture locally in Oregon is even more stark (see state-by-state breakdowns in the same tables): by 2010, they project that Oregon will be short 5,300 nurses, with 81% of demand filled; in 2015 we'll be down 10,000 nurses at 68% coverage; by 2020, the state will be in need of 15,300 additional nurses and will have only 56% of its needs covered.
This shortage will ensure that for the forseeable future, I shouldn't have any trouble at all with finding a job as an R.N. One downside to this shortage, though, is that it will likely force a larger burden of patient care on nurses that are today often already feeling overworked and underpaid. I imagine this will lead to increasing and increasingly contentious policy confrontations between health care employers and nursing organizations such as unions.
Though these facts do have this negative aspect, overall I'm looking forward to ample job security and the knowledge that with training in such a high-demand field, I will be very valuable to my employer and that I can lend a hand with one of the great health care challenges on the current horizon.
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