Education and Careers

I just saw this article posted up on Slashdot, and it cuts to an issue I've heard come up repeatedly ever since I went to school.

Of my cohort coming out of High School, I was one of only a few to go to college. Rural Oregon is a pretty blue-collar place, and many of my friends were either joining the military, going to technical school, or launching themselves directly into the workplace. One even had started his own business and was looking to do it full time come graduation. At the time I thought they were just taking the easy way out; after all, it took good grades, test scores, and a hell of a willingness to delay gratification to go to college. In fact, it seemed like the key to success was education--the more the better. People with money are Doctors and Lawyers, people who work a McDonalds are those with GEDs.

Almost a decade later, the world looks a little different. Friedman pegged it nicely when he said what you really need for success is to be one of four things: Adaptable, Anchored, Specialized or Special. I hit specialized pretty nicely; there are only about 2 million RNs in the entire country, and only a couple thousand of those work in Informations Systems.

I actually took the slow path though, since I could probably have been exactly where I am right now about three years earlier if I'd gone to community college, picked up my RN there, and worked for two years. Two years is really the golden number when it comes to Nursing experience, because from there people assume you know the ropes. At the time I was going to school, IT at hospitals had just started picking up Nurse Informaticists, and the iron was blazing hot. You didn't even need computer skills, they hired people with no training and threw them into training programs, or just hoped that they'd pick up the skills on the job. No one anywhere was making less that 60k a year doing that work, and most were closer to 80.

My family would have made me a pariah for doing so, since the expectation was that I wasn't achieving my potential. Potential, however, seems to be related more to networking, desired field, and timing. I'm not any good at networking (social media always seems like another chore), but my desired field was a perfect fit with the way the economy is going short-term. It's striking that my decision to go on for graduate education after undergrad pretty much blew my timing to hell though, landing me fresh out of school in the worst economy since 1932.

I'm actually working in Informatics now, but I can't help but think that my friends who went to community college and picked up skills in basic engineering and CAD who now have houses (while my wife I are trying to decide whether we'll ever actually be home owners) didn't have a better plan. I liked college, and I love my graduate program, but I think I would have liked spending my weekends having fun somewhere warm rather than freezing to death in Cleveland banging out 20-page essays in APA.

Here I Sit

Next week--May 11th--will mark the second graduation I have failed to attend. Both were voluntary decisions; the first because my family lives in Oregon and wasn't about to fly out to Cleveland just to watch me put on a cap and gown, while the second was the result of my wife Amanda and I deciding we would rather spend time with her family in New Jersey than spend another week in our crappy one bedroom apartment.

We left on May 7th, and on May 9th Amanda was admitted to the hospital. The last few days she's been battling with a small papule that grew into full-blown preseptal cellulits, and I've been keeping vigil at her bedside to make sure that she gets the best possible care. This has turned out to be a pretty easy task, because the quality of care here is excellent, and the facility is both well-designed and contemporary.

I almost never get sick, and have never been hospitalized (exempting a couple brief ER visits as a kid), so my knowledge of the health care delivery system is a little one-sided. I think that's what made it so easy to get into the field in the first place. It seemed in school like my experience was not out of the ordinary, with most of the nursing students rarely getting ill and having experienced health care delivery vicariously, rather than principally. Hell, I didn't even have vicarious experiences to draw on--my family is also of remarkably good health.

There's no proxy for a sudden shift in perspective in regards to your work environment. I think we have all had the experience of attempting to use technology or a service, and being forced to wonder "did the person who designed this thing ever have to use it?" According to my Computer Science friends, the answer is probably "no".

So as a nurse, as a husband, and as an informaticist I'm trying to mine this experience for all its worth. I blogged before "blog" was coined by Peter Merholz, instead just writing what I thought of as short essays and posting them to a Tripod account in order to teach myself HTML. I haven't done it in a while though, because I've been busy. As most nurses can appreciate, nursing school isn't a picnic at any level, and this last year was a marathon of academic coursework and a full-time internship that left me barely enough time to get married to Amanda and still get out with my sanity.

With no school, employment, or personal obligations right now, my wife's care is all I'm focused on. That said, there are large breaks in the day (like now) where she's asleep and there's no work to do, so I've decided to blog again, and what better to blog about than the thing I know best. So the next few posts are going to dedicated to my experience on the client-side of care, and how they reflect pertinent issues within the healthcare delivery system and health information technology.