Hallelujah, holy crap!

First an update on school. I took my final in Health Assessment this morning. That's right, my final. A 15 week, two credit course was compressed into ten days. I scored a 49 out of 54 and I have two bonus points coming so my adjusted score is 51 out of 54. I bombed one quiz, but they drop the lowest score and the rest of them were perfect scores. So I lost a total of 5 points out of a possible 204 which gives me an A for the written potion of the course.

I take the practical exam tomorrow. My brother and his wife are coming over tonight so that I can practice what I need to do. She's a physician, so she can look at the sheet that I'm being evaluated on and make sure I hit everything. In reality, I would really have to screw the thing up to fail it. So I should be good.

In related news, we got our clinical assignments today. Two weeks from today I'll be in the hospital with actual patients.

It looks like the first five weeks is going to be on a day shift, Thursday and Friday about 25 miles from home. Someone told me we'll be on an Oncology unit, which I'm not really looking forward to. Since it's the first clinicals all we'll be doing is changing sheets, giving baths and being what my sister in law calls Scut Bunnies. And if there is one thing I am sure of, it's that an Oncology unit has plenty of soiled linen and vomiting people. Great.

The second clinical rotation is psych. This one is about 25 miles in the other direction, also Thursday and Friday, but is an afternoon shift, 3PM to 11 AM. So that means we get to feed the whackos and put them to bed. Sounds like fun. In reality it shouldn't be too bad. From what I can tell the place is a private facility with fewer than 50 resident patients.

And finally some news. I may have mentioned in that past that I am Macedonian. 100%, purple ribbon bred. My ancestors are from present day Albania and Greece. The language is basically a Slavic language, totally unrelated to Greek, which is Hellenic. But that's not important right now. All that you really need to know is that my heritage is fully (and recently too, we got here in the 1920's and 30's) European. I'm white and I'm male. And today, guess what that meant? It meant I am a minority. In nursing. Most nurses are white women, so anyone who's not a white woman is a minority in the field.

So what? you might ask. I'll tell you so what. At my orientation for the program last November the program director told us about a scholarship being offered by a large philanthropic organization that you often hear about if you listen to NPR. This foundation had given my school a lump of money to use as scholarships for minority students. In order to qualify for the scholarship you had to be something other than a white female, have a 3.5 GPA or higher and be willing to act as a mentor for future students in the accelerated nursing program. In order to win the scholarship you had to submit a 1 page, double spaced, 12pt. ariel font "paper" about why you chose nursing. The seven best papers would be awarded scholarships.

Somewhere I have a copy of what I wrote, but I don't know exactly what I said anymore. I wrote it the day before it was due, sent it to a couple of people who helped me to edit it, and turned it in the next day. My reasons were mostly BS and basically said I wanted to achieve self actualization through altruism and had been inspired by my mom (who was a nurse) and other nurses who cared for her and some other family members. The stuff that I wrote was true, but my real reasons were about job security, opportunity and financial gain.

After I got my clinical assignments the instructor had some envelopes for people and started calling names and passing them out. I saw pretty quickly that it was the "minority" students who were being called. Naturally I was one of the last to get an envelope. I took a quick look, and the first word was Congratulations!

So it turns out that I got a $10,000 scholarship (that's right $10K) for being a minority student. And we were told that it's not really a scholarship, they're just going to write me a check, so it's more like a grant. All I have to do is provide a letter of acceptance and a letter agreeing to be a mentor and I'm in the money.

I'm pretty sure that this is the first and last time I'll ever be a minority anything, but you have no idea how much this is going to help.

I talked to Mona and we have to decide how to allocate the funds, but man what a great problem to have. We need to figure out if there are any tax implications first. Then we'll decide if we just use the money to pay for daycare for pretty much the rest of the year or just pay the last semester's tuition pretty much flat out, or pay off her car loan and have that extra cash every month. If we hold it for a while I think we'll stick it in a CD in order to get as much out of it as we can.

And that's why I called this post Hallelujah, holy crap!