Week 9 Reflection
An informational interview is an informal conversation with someone working in an area that interests you who will give you information and advice. So, I just decided to do my interview with the NICU registered nurse that I shadowed at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte. For my shadowing experience in the NICU, I was placed with Crystina Marwitz, an RN in the neonatal intensive care nursery. During the experience, I really enjoyed shadowing her and learned a lot while there. If I had a child in the NICU, she is the type of nurse that I would want taking care of my baby. So, doing an informational interview with her was a great deal of help and encouragement. Lately, I have been a little unsure on whether I want to stick to being a registered nurse or go higher and become a nurse practitioner in the specific field. I was going to try to interview a nurse practitioner to get more information, but that did not work out, so I just did Crystina since I knew her. After shadowing her, I really found to love more of what the registered nurses did rather than the nurse practitioners. The RN’s seemed to be more hands on and that is the kind of person I am. So, with this interview here are some questions I asked and the responses that I got:
· How did you become so passionate in neonatal rather than the general nurse?
The environment in the NICU is one like no other. We see and hear all of these babies and these little patients are just growing and wanting to live.
· What specific skills are needed for the work that you do?
Many skills are essential for work in the NICU. You need critical care skills and be able to be an effective communicator when you have the parents coming in wanting updates and such on their child. Charting and medication calculations are also very important. If you do not like to untangle things, this is not the job for you. You must be able to work with very tiny bodies-and sometimes quickly!
· How do you process the challenging times that come your way?
When you have to keep interventions going, there can be a lot of strain and pressure I will say. You see them struggling and sometimes you don’t want to see them going through such pain and suffering anymore. I think my coworkers help a lot because this is an opportunity to talk to others who are in the same place and you can do things to get it out of your head.
· How are the families and do they come in all the time?
Yes, we see families come in all the time and usually they are terrified that their child could be close to death. I try to ease them and tell them what is going on and why they are attached to so many different things. Mostly, I try to get them to stay positive. We do get a lot of Spanish families that come in, so we have to get interpreters in order to effectively provide the families with the information that they need.
So, these are just some questions that I asked. But, overall Crystina loves her job and she is good at what she does. The best advice I was given was to probably: do not take college for granted and just to get experience of what I really want to do. Like she suggested even looking into the healthy babies to make sure I wanted to do the sick versus the healthy ones in Labor and Delivery. There is also pediatrics, but she really helped me a lot and was more than happy to answer any of my questions. The greatest takeaway I can build upon is to get into shadowing other fields that I could be interested in, or even if not interested just do it to see!
