Nurse Interview Reflection

Fall semester of 2016 I completed a career trajectory project in nursing school that prompted me to assess my future career goals deeper than ever before. Following up on that project I had the opportunity to interview a nurse who has taken the career path I hope to go down. My purpose for this interview was to gain further insight into the my choice career path, and see if it truly was something I was interested in or not what I expected. The questions asked were aimed at uncovering perspectives unknown to me. In this paper I will be discussing why I chose the nurse for the interview, the main points of the interview, and my biggest take aways from what I learned.

Rational For the Nurse Interview The nurse I chose is a work colleague of

Each question asked got more developed and involved more as we had discussion on each one. For example I would follow up Becky’s response with either paraphrasing or further prompting her with a short question about her response. This helped me ensure I understood the point she was getting across and made the interview more active for me personally. The most important thing I learned personally came from question 4 and 5, which added a new perspective about teaching to my knowledge. Like Becky I also would have assumed that each student came prepared and ready to learn, which is even the expectation in my Professionalism class. But the reality is that there are students that will be unmotivated and unprepared. An unmotivated student is a form of conflict, because they are putting their work and the teachers time at risk. The way Becky stated going about helping unmotivated students reflected some aspects of the thirteen characteristics of transformational and innovative leaders (Melnyk, Malloch, and Gallagher-Ford 2017). To help unmotivated students a teacher needs to be dedicated to the students and their work, as well as motivational and positive. After this interview I realize how much the concepts of being a leader as a bedside nurse also apply to being a leader of a class or clinical group. Overall it made me consider more