How I got my first travel nurse assignment...and maybe my last?

Have you seen how much money travel nurses make? I did! My first encounters with travel nurses occurred during my first year as a new grad staff nurse. I vividly recall one nurse asking me, “How much are they paying you as a new grad?” I sheepishly whispered, “$21 an hour…” The travel nurse scoffed and proceeded to show me his pay from just ONE week of working 36 hours.

How much do you think he made? $2K? $3K? Nah, try EIGHT-THOUSAND DOLLARS. It blew my mind. We were doing the same work, but I was making roughly one-tenth of what he was making. This set me on a path to becoming a travel nurse!

If you're interested in my journey to becoming a travel nurse, read on!

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Endless Learning

Now, you might think, “This kid did not seriously try and apply for travel contracts with just one year as a nurse?!” No…no, I didn’t. My journey from being a new grad nurse to becoming a travel nurse took me three years. Although I wanted to make good money, I also wanted to make sure that I would NEVER sacrifice the safety of my patients and my license for a quick buck.

My first year was spent really understanding how the ICU worked and how to take care of patients in the ICU. I spent 12 weeks in an orientation program. This involved a guided preceptorship, hands-on training, and reviewing modules from the Essentials of Critical Care Orientation by the AACN provided by my hospital and watching endless YouTube videos about critical care in my free time (if you're interested in what channels I watched, let me know in the comments!).

I actively sought mentorship from our ICU’s multitude of seasoned nurses with varying backgrounds. Some of my most memorable mentors included a charge nurse only 2 years ahead of me who made his 2 years look like 5! Another was a charge nurse with dialysis experience and a knack for reading doctors’ minds. His ability to make suggestions that were very much in line with every doctor’s thoughts always amazed me. Finally, the last mentor I’ll mention (I can keep going, but I’ll keep this list short) is a chill-as-ice former marine with CVICU, Trauma ICU, ED, and PACU experience. His nonchalant demeanor was a stark contrast to his seemingly endless knowledge that made him seem like the elite of critical care nurses.

Over countless cups of coffee shared with these mentors, I inquired about each patient, their diseases and their pathophysiology, medication drips and their various uses, and how each of them came to be the nurses that they were and still are today.

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Charge Nurse: Volunteer or Voluntold?

How many of you actually applied and wanted to become a charge nurse? I’d have to bet only a few! At the hospital I started with the charge nurse role wasn’t a separate job title. The job description as a nurse included, “willing to act as charge nurse when necessary”. I’ll be honest and say I didn’t read that when I first signed on. Once I passed my 1-year mark as a bedside nurse, I was “voluntold” to become a charge nurse. A part of me dreaded this, but another part of me was excited at this new opportunity.

As I mentioned before, I was mentored by many charge nurses who were also fantastic bedside nurses. They stood right by the intensivist working together to stabilize patients during rapid response events and code blues, and during acute emergencies in the ICU. I admired their knowledge, skills, and ability to lead each shift toward success. Ultimately, their combined knowledge and experiences helped shape me into a charge nurse whom they could be proud of.

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The End of an Era or the Beginning of a New One?

Just as I was getting comfortable with the team that I worked with, they slowly started to leave. Some left to pursue higher education while others left out of frustration with healthcare as a whole. Although we threw going-away celebrations for each of them, they weren’t really celebrations in my mind. Watching the people who helped me grow from a baby new grad to a competent and confident ICU nurse, leave was tough and made me dread the uncertainty of my future as a charge nurse.

With so many seasoned nurses leaving, my friends and I, whom I started my nursing journey with, were forced to step up and fill the voids left by our mentors. This meant rarely working with them because we all had to take on roles as charge nurses. In hindsight, the opportunity to be independent of the friends that I relied on so heavily when I first started led to my growth and success as a charge and bedside nurse.

The mass exodus of seasoned nurses, or nurses in general, is a universal and unfortunate event in the nursing world. Despite this, as the saying goes, “When one door closes another one opens.” Becoming the “adult” nurse meant taking on the responsibility of teaching and training new-to-ICU nurses, new travel nurses, and new graduate nurses. I’ve lost track of how many nurses I’ve had to train, but I can, with certainty, count the number of nurses that I trained that I had grown to trust and rely on just as much as I relied on the friends I started out with.

Soon enough, bonds were created between myself and my new coworkers. These new coworkers eventually became friends. I was blessed with the opportunity to witness one friend's beautiful wedding ceremony at the beach. Another friend, I grew close enough to call a homie and we could gossip and complain endlessly about work on and off the clock. The last friend that I’ll mention is someone that could make an awful shift so much better with the baked goodies she would bring nearly every shift.

If you look at the title of this section again you might guess what came next. Three years went by in the blink of an eye. In those three years, a global pandemic changed the world. I gained and lost coworkers, teammates, and friends in those three years. Just as soon as I had witnessed the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, I would bring about the end of another and never see the next one begin. After three years, I made the jump, feet first into the depths of the travel nurse world.

If you've enjoyed my journey so far, keep an eye out for the next part as I delve into how I got started with finding a travel assignment and the slew of events that came after!

Thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment!

Until next time! Salamat and si yu’us ma’ase!