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Current career position: I work at the University of Kansas School of Nursing. As part of this job, one day a week I work at the Family Medicine clinic and see older adult patients who live at an Assisted Living facility. It is really rewarding to help these patients stay healthy so they can reach their goals. Other days I teach classes to students who are learning to be Adult-Geriatric Nurse Practitioners. Most of these students are really excited about their new career goals and it's fun to help them learn the skills they will need for new jobs in advanced nursing practice. I've also worked with our local Alzheimer's Association for almost 20 years, sometimes leading support groups and sometimes teaching families about Alzheimer's Disease. Other parts of my job include research and writing articles. Additionally I've learned how to create web-based courses and teach nursing courses on the Web. Education: I went to a two year community college and first learned to be an RN. It was a good, fast way for me to get the credential I needed to work as a nurse. Then while I worked part time (sometimes fulltime) I took additional courses until I got my bachelors degree and then my master's degree in nursing. I taught for a while with my master's degree and then felt like I wanted more school so I could learn to do research and be a better writer and teacher. That's when I went back to the University of Kansas to get my PhD. Toughest barriers to overcome to arrive at your current position: Well, this is a tough one. I suppose the biggest challenge (although in many ways this was also fun for me) was completing projects and course work to obtain the nursing degrees I have. Sometimes the projects didn't seem relevant to my career goals, but most of the time I ended up learning things that were really important to my current job. Learning clinical skills was both fun and challenging. Most exciting part of my career: I like to work with older adult patients and I really enjoy teaching. I get to do both those things with my current job. In addition to these neat parts of my job, other fun things I get to do include write articles about older adult problems for nursing journals, do research on eating problems some older adults have, and develop and write grants to get new nursing education projects started. I attend several different national meetings with friends each year (and I really enjoy traveling to different places). These meeting help me keep learning and updating myself in geriatric nursing and education. The meetings also give me a chance to present my projects/research and share things I've learned with my colleagues.
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