Project Outline

So far, I have not gotten a lot done for my project.  I have, however, created an outline and started some of the research I need to complete my project.

- Introduction of Problem.. Forced to pick career at 18
- Other student's saying they're equally confused (interviews, quotes?)
- My plan of some part of nursing field
- Explaining different levels of nursing
- Assistant, Practical, Registered, Practitioner.
-Explaining my possible choice and why
-Slide of ideas to help out other students pick their possible career
- Credits

My plan to make my video interesting and creative is to try to make it appealing to students.  I'm not going to include long, drawn out interviews like I had in my first video, and I'm going to try to use a lot of numbers and statistics to get my ideas across.  I think statistics and numbers in bullet form will help make my project more easy to pay attention to and enjoy.

Final Project Proposal

For my final project, I'd like to do a project on the career I'm choosing.  I think deciding your entire life's plan when you're 18 and a freshman in college is very stressful and difficult for most people.  Through my first semester of college I've felt a lot of pressure to know exactly what I want to spend the rest of my life doing.  I need to pick the right classes and study the right things in order to get the correct degree I'm going to need.  I've thought about the idea of leaving Southern Connecticut and going somewhere else, like Gateway, to get an associates in nursing rather than a bachelors. I don't know what the difference in career and salary would be with these two different degrees, and that's one of the things I want to look into for my project.    I'd like to create a project on the different levels or nursing to help me decide what I'm going to pursue.  I know that there are many different kinds of "nurses".  There's nursing assistants, practical nurses, registered nurses, and nurse practitioners.  Each has different skill levels, education levels, and salaries.  Some require college, some require graduate school, and some require only short programs and a certification test. 

Reading Response for Krista's Group

I remembered that Krista had said that she was going to use the video project topic for our next project as well and that's what I saw when I opened her group's readings.  I thought this was a really interesting topic and I was happy to learn more about it.  Their first reading was friendly to read and easy.  I thought the second reading didn't look so friendly and was more of one big block that I skimmed through more than I read.  After reading the articles I think I have decided that I'm a Kinesthetic learner.  Throughout highschool I seem to have done better in classes that had some type of hands on learning, like my sciences and arts.  I have always loved math, but sometimes I just can't comprehend what is going on because it's purely hearing and seeing and there's nothing you can touch.  It's more of an abstract concept and I think this makes it difficult for me sometimes.  I chose nursing as my current career path for many reasons, but one of them would be that its very hands-on with patients.  I'm extremely excited to get to actually be accepted into a nursing program (fingers crossed) and get to work with all the equipment and the dummy patients, as I think I will do much better with this than I do with abstract concepts that you can't actually use your hands in.  To me, Krista's group chose a really great topic to teach us about because it directly relates to all of us and how we learn best in college.  I do think though that they could have chosen more interesting readings on the topic. 

Double Campus Safari

Campus Safari 1 - This week I took a trip to the health center.  I have the worst immune system of anyone I know, so of course I'm sick.  I wanted to make sure I didn't have anything worse than a cold so I made an appointment.  I waited in the waiting room before I was taken in.  The woman who saw me was a nurse practitioner.  She took my temperature and my blood pressure and then listened to my lungs.  She also gave me a rapid strep test, which thankfully came back negative.  I asked her some questions about the cold to be able to make it into a campus safari post.  I asked if there was anything I could do.  She told me that because a cold is a viral sickness, things like antibiotics are ineffective and are only used for illness caused by bacteria.  She told me to take ibuprofen and gave me a goodie-bag of cough drops, a reusable super cool paper thermometer, a fact sheet, and a decongestant.  She said that colds typically last 10 to 12 days so I should be prepared for another week of feeling less than great.  She also gave me some tips on how not to spread it to my roommates, like cleaning the door knobs and other things we all touch.  All - in - all I think the health center was great and a really good alternative to a student's normal doctor when they live on campus. 

Campus Safari 2 - This week I also went to the library to meet with my Inquiry group.  After we had finished our meeting, I went to find a book that my Anthropology Professor has discussed with us.  We eventually need to get it to read some passages.  It's called "Patterns of Culture" by Ruth Benedict.  It was in the SCSU stacks and had the call number GN400.B4.  I thought it was relatively easy to find after we had our library instruction earlier in the year in Inquiry.  The library seems pretty simple to get used to and it's easier to get used to finding the things you want than I had expected. Being a wishful thinker, I was hoping this book was a novel or had some sort of story, but I should have known from the title that this wasn't the case.  When I flipped through it I saw that it had absolutely enormous chapters, all of them about 50+ pages, and I know that we already have to read two over our Thanksgiving break.  The writing seemed technical and bland, but hopefully it's something me and my classmates can get through easily!

Reading Response for Mike, Tina, and Mike's Group

The first group I read for was Mike's group.  The posts were about surviving all of the debt after college when you don't get the job you thought you'd get with the degree you earned.  The first one was about a man that says it would have been more worth his while to go to jail than it was to go to college.  He's in 30,000 of student loan debt, and although he can make the minimum payment on time, he doesn't feel hIe can keep his head above water. It then went on to talk about the statistics with college students and credit card debt.  The second paper was about a plan to lessen the burden on college grads with their student debt.  It also mentions that student loan debt now surpasses credit card debt in the United States.  After reading the two articles, I'm honestly a little nervous about my life.  I think I made the best choice I could with coming to SCSU because it's less than a quarter of the price of the other school I was considering.  I really hope that my life won't be like the people in this articles because I plan to be a nurse, and the demand for nurses is supposedly huge.  I like to think that this means that I won't graduate then continue to work at a skill-less job for minimum wage while making minimum payments on my loans while the interest racks up.  I know a few graduates of nursing programs and both of them have really great jobs and lots of money to blow on new cars and vacations and other things.  The only difference is that in both of the situations they don't have any or a lot of loans to pay off.  One of the girls has a wealthy father who paid for her school outright.  The other one went to a university that her father worked at, and got a drastic cut in her tuition price.  I'll have to actually pay off all my loans and debts myself.  Ah.

Second Interest

One thing that interests me and is connected to SCSU is Nursing.  I chose Southern Connecticut State University because it has such a good reputation for having a really great nursing program.  At Southern, the nursing falls under the School of Health and Human Services.  They have a four-year program, and other programs beyond that to get different degrees like a masters or a doctorate.  Nursing is my career of choice because of how versatile and exciting it is. The nursing demand is huge, and it will always be needed.  Nurses help treat and educate patients and provide advice and emotional support.  Once you become a registered nurse, you can work in many different settings.  You can work in a hospital, a clinic, a nursing home, or in many other places.  The nursing earnings outlook for New Haven CT is about $69,000. I think that I would like to work in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Neonatal refers to the first 28 days of life, and a Neonatal Nurse works in a nursery, either Level I for healthy babies, Level II for premature babies, or Level III for babies who are too sick to be in the other two nurseries.  I think working with babies and helping them become healthy enough to move home with their parents would be an incredibly rewarding, yet difficult job.  I have a friend who is currently a Neonatal nurse and she has told me that where she works, you basically get assigned one baby and that's the baby you take care of until it's healthy.  You get very attached to the baby, and sometimes they don't always get healthy.  It's a job where you have to be able to separate yourself and deal with loss often and in a healthy way.





http://www.nursesource.org/neonatal.html

Gay Marriage Rights

I'm writing a paper on gay marriage in another class, and I think it's a very interesting topic that others may also be interested in.  I have really strong views on gay marriage and I'd hope that many others would share the same views.  To me, I think it's ridiculous to tell people that they are not allowed to have the same marriage rights because they love someone different than they're "supposed" to.  I think that it in no way affects the sanctity of marriage itself, when the divorce rate of straight couples is astronomical, and Kim Kardashian is allowed to spend millions on a wedding that lasts 70 days, but two people who are honestly in love will make straight marriages less meaningful? I don't think that makes any sense at all.  I believe that a person is equal to any other person, no matter what they believe, who they love, and what the color of their skin is.  I don't think being homosexual makes a person less equal than the rest of the population, where they don't deserve the same rights.  In my opinion, a lot of the people who are opposed to gay marriage think that way because of their religious views.  I agree completely with their right to think this way, but church and state should  be seperated and their should not be any laws based on religious beliefs.  Laws should protect people and their properties, not constrict marriages and other rights.  Unfortunetly, I don't think this is an issue that will be resolved in any kind of timely manner, and even though some states are allowing it, I think it will be years and years before homosexuals are actually seen as equals in our society. 

I found a few resources if people wanted any more information :

http://arguingequality.org/

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-gay-marriage-20111101,0,6750292.story