Here is the moment you’ve all been waiting for–find out if nursing is really for you. You can take this idiotic quiz, and then discover that no matter what answer you give, they will find a way of twisting it into a nursing-is-the-right-career-for-you. The website is really just a ploy to get your email address so that they can email you spam about signing up in one of their online college programs, but it really is amusing how they manage to put a nursing twist on every answer.
I took this silly quiz, just to see how the answers would come out, and answered the questions int he most “nurse negative way” possible. But wouldn’t you know, they have a positive spin on everything. For example, the question, “The sight of blood makes me…”
I answered choice d. It makes me panic.
Now, how can you be a nurse if blood makes you panic. Well, here is their cheerleading response.
“Sometimes we think it’s the sight of blood that upsets us, when in reality for many of us it’s the idea of pain and suffering that we have such a hard time dealing with. If you receive education and training on how to alleviate pain and suffering in patients, you may find you are gifted in this area. For those who really are terrified at the sight of blood, there are plenty of nursing jobs where day-to-day contact with blood is not expected.”
Is this enough to make you queasy or what? They don’t say how someone who is terrified at the sight of blood can get through a nursing program, even if working with blood is not going to be in their future. But aside from the impossibility of avoiding the sight of blood during nursing school, the only way that a new grad is going to get a blood free job is to:
a) stay in school, don’t get a job, and get a degree in management–and then hide in an office in an insurance company where you will never have patient contact. Although, most companies do not want case workers with no experience.
b) work in a “low blood” situation like a psych unit, but even that’s not a guarantee of no blood.
There really isn’t much else around that is going to keep you free from the sight of blood–not until you get some experience at least. But these rah-rah ads never let on what nursing is really about. And this quiz, like most other pseudo advertising websites, tries to convince you that no matter what you’re answer (ie, you can’t deal with stress) that nursing is the career for you.
I remember this website from some California based organization that was telling readers that you didn’t have to have be good at math to be a nurse (never mind drug calculations!), or even be intelligent. It also pointed out how you could be a nurse without doing patient care, and then went on to list all of the different “jobs” that a nurse could have; lawyer, hospital administrator, pharmaceutical rep, etc. I wrote them and said that if someone wanted to be a lawyer, why on earth would they become a nurse first? Why not just go to law school? Duh, like being a nurse is a prerequisite for law. Ditto for a hospital admin–just get an MBA and save yourself the agony of nursing school. And if you want to be a pharm rep, you can do that any number of ways, one by becoming a pharmacist–which pays a lot better and has a lot less stress.
Just in case you want to take the quiz, to see if a nursing career is in your stars….