For the Newly Graduated Nurse
Information provided by Kaplan Test Prep

Welcome to nursing! You are embarking on a career whose challenge and diversity will provide you with some of the finest opportunities for professional achievement and personal growth to be found anywhere.

Defect Doom and Gloom Thinking and Ignore Pessimistic Thinkers.
Infuse yourself with the energy of those who believe in the possible. Separate from those who seem habituated to the impossible.

Find a Mentor or Coach.
Nursing practice can be as complicated as it is rewarding. Mentors and coaches can be stabilizing forces of encouraging direction.

Establish a Peer Support Group.
Select people who are willing to speak to your strengths, support your growth, and search for solutions. Take care to prevent this useful strategy from disintegrating into nonproductive, contagious, and energy-depleting grip sessions. Find a facilitator, if necessary, or rotate this function among the participants.

Prepare for Reality Shock.
All new graduates in all industries, especially professionals, need to allow time to merge school values with work realities. Being prepared for this necessary stage of professional development will ease the difficulty of this transition.

Resist Being “Eaten” by your “Elders”.
There is a terrible saying in nursing: “Nurses eat their young.” You may have even experienced a little of this as a student, when some nurses might have been less receptive or helpful to you than they should have been. Prepare yourself for this potential by developing assertive communication, seeking out mentors and peer support, and trusting in yourself.

Clarify Your Values.
Resist internalizing an implicit set of impossible-to-meet values that are never spoken aloud or taught but which you might find yourself mindlessly enacting. This value, enforced by peer pressure, infers that nurses are “all things to all people, and need to finish all their work, on time, perfectly before they go home.” Think about it: All things? All people? All their work? Perfectly? Refute it! Resist it! Clarify and operate by a more realistic set of standards that recognizes the 24-hour nature of a team-based model of practice. Once again, seek out supportive mentors, coaches, and peers.

Be Patient with Yourself, Even if Others Are Not.
It will take time for you to move from a novice nurse to a proficient one. Your education gives you the basic foundation and sketches an outline upon which you will build from the time you graduate, throughout your entire career.

Believe in Yourself and What You Have to Offer.
New graduates, especially those with a B.S.N., have a competitive edge and should use it. Market yourself effectively. Your eagerness, fresh idealism, and willingness to learn is a very attractive commodity to organizations often mired in resistance to change.

Define your nursing mission/purpose and develop a vision of your work as a nurse. Your mission and vision will contribute to your inner and career stability as you move between workplaces more often than generations of nurses that preceded you.

Find Your Niche.
There are many ways to be a nurse and something for everyone in nursing. Take your responsibility for self care seriously. Care for yourself as well as you are learning to care for others.

This article was adapted from Careers in Nursing,
by Annette Vallano
Published by Kaplan, Inc. and Simon & Schuster, 1999