Who: Paris Jongkind
What: Registered nurse-in-waiting
Where: Edmonton

It’s 1 p.m. on a weekday and Paris Jongkind is still sleeping. She has just got off one of her 12-hour shifts in an intensive care unit. The last few months, let alone the last few days, have been busy. Her calendar looked something like this: April: Finish Bachelor of Science in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta. May: Start work in the ICU. June: Take the Canadian Registered Nurse Exam. This last one was important, because right now she’s working as a grad student, not an RN. The exam results won’t come until August. Laughing when asked if she has any anxiety about the test, she says, “It was a very long exam.” July: Thailand.

Recent University of Alberta grad (and soon-to-be nurse) Paris Jongkind

In a few days, Jongkind, who is 22, will leave for that six-week trip overseas. Yet later in the afternoon when she finally wakes up, she sounds relaxed and cheerful. This equilibrium will serve her well on those 12-hour days.

Jongkind has chosen a career that is eminently employable — people are going to get sick, no matter what the economy is up to. That,and she started looking early. “A lot of my friends started applying in mid-March. All those people have new jobs. Some who waited until they were done have no jobs,” she says of a hiring freeze that was sweeping the Alberta Health Services, a provincial organization that employs 90,000 people.

As part of a program for new nursing grads, Jongkind buddies up with another nurse for six months, kind of like an internship. “I think it’s to ease you into the career, instead of being thrown on the floor with no help and five patients,” says Jongkind. When the six months are up she’ll apply for a “line,” or rotation, at a hospital. “It’s kind of scary, but at the same time I’m willing to try different areas of nursing, like maybe oncology or obstetrics.”

Mention graduation and she says, simply, “Oh, it feels good.” She leaves for Thailand soon, and comes back just as summer is drawing to a close and will then start to make the rounds.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 9:40 am and is filed under First Job, Profiles, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.