About 2 years ago, while working on an ambulance, I was known by many of my coworkers as the guy who would never pursue nursing. Repeated encounters with horrible nurses negatively shaped my perspective of the position; I saw nursing as a redundant field overflowing with incompetence and populated with the kind of people I'd be better off not associating with. With that said, I will be successfully finishing the first semester of my nursing program in about 2 weeks. I experienced a change of pace and scenery after switching to a hospital-based CCT program, where I had the opportunity to interact with and work alongside nurses at a greater level, and realized how hilariously wrong I had been about nursing. Having changed my mindset accordingly, I now want to be a nurse because I've realized that nursing is a career where your capabilities are directly proportional to the effort you put in. In other words, nursing is a career that provides the opportunity for continual improvement, continual education, and continual growth. It's up to the individual nurse whether they'll waste this opportunity or take full advantage and become the kind of nurse who was able to change a perspective as stubborn as mine. Perhaps I've been influenced too heavily by some of the nurses I got to know during my ambulance days, but I am going to pursue NICU as an RN. Being a guy, I often receive strange looks when I mention this and am regularly met with surprise or even confusion. "You don't see many men wanting to enter that specialty" is a statement I've heard repeatedly from my classmates, instructors, as well as nurses I've asked for advice from. I want to pursue this field because of its tremendous impact on its patients lives: if adult specialties can extend a patient's life by 20+ years, then NICU can extend its patients lives by 80+ years. I by no means mean to undermine the importance of other specialties, but it's hard to beat the feeling of giving such a tiny person the opportunity to live a full life they otherwise wouldn't have. I'll be honest, I really don't understand why more people aren't trying to get into NICU or similar fields. In my mind, NICU and the fields relating to it are, without a doubt, the most incredible positions any healthcare personnel could ever hold. I hope that as a nurse, I can infect all my coworkers (not just the nurses) with this passion and cause them to share my selfish desire: I want the greatest possible return on my investments; I want to provide patients with the opportunity to live the longest and most fulfilling life conceivable. Being a nurse will allow me the honor of helping them every step of the way.

There was a brief period of time where I found myself attending school full time, while simultaneously working full time in order to complete my education quickly while still being able to save money for Nursing school. I did initially enjoy the challenge of it all, but did notice that these various aspects of my health were deteriorating quickly. I wasn't eating properly (or at all, on some days), I had stopped going to the gym, and was averaging just over 4 hours of sleep each day, and even consecutive all-nighters from time to time, but I was told myself that this was all to make my schedule work, and that this would just be a temporary thing. But the burnout did hit eventually. My grades began dropping little by little, I would show up to work exhausted, to the point where my coworkers and supervisors would pull me aside from time to time and ask if everything was alright. I would insist that everything was fine, and would even brag about how well I was doing on occasion though in all honesty, I was exhausted beyond words. my final "wake-up call" was when I found that I had lost almost 15lbs over just a few months. This was concerning, because I have always been healthy, and maintained a low body fat, so in no context was losing 15lbs a good thing for me. Additionally, when I would get out and go rock climbing (bouldering being one of my favorite hobbies) I noticed that I had grown severely weaker, and had dropped down several grades ("grades" being levels of difficulty for climbs) After speaking with knowledgeable people far wiser than I, I Determined to change two things: (1) Get at least 6 hours of sleep in each night, and (2) Eat a real breakfast every morning. The first of these was more challenging to me, due to a perceived shortage of time, but I decided to at least try it out. Though I now technically had less time each day, I found myself using time better: Homework went by faster, I had more energy throughout the day, etc. For the rest of that semester, I continued aiming for these two things and eventually started to find myself having time to spare. Not enough to get a full workout in the gym perhaps, but often it was enough for a run before school, or to meal prep for the following meals/days to save time later on. Before long, I had managed to raise my grades up a bit, and also found that I didn't mind the workload so much anymore. Don't get me wrong, finishing that semester was nothing short of brutal, but I learned how to make it manageable. Above all, I found that health and well being goes hand-in-hand with time management in a strange way. I found that when I allow my physical health to deteriorate, my work and academic performance would also deteriorate, creating stress, and deteriorates my mental health, further leaving me exhausted and emotionally unwell. This would further diminish my physical health (due to lack of motivation to eat right or exercise for instance), creating a positive feedback loop of academic and quite literally physical doom. I've learned the hard way that by prioritizing my health first, I can be better and do better at whatever it is that I have set my mind to do, allowing me to achieve greater things.