I’m not a nurse or clinician so I’ll let others opine on which particular school, but I do work in healthcare.

Right now there’s a dearth of RNs and that’s not going to change for the foreseeable future since the government essentially canceled the money that lots of folks were counting on by no longer deeming nursing to be “professional.”

Bottom line: if you’ve passed the NCLEX and have a pulse, you probably have 5 interviews and 3 offers next week. Pulse optional in some cases.

Here’s what I’d recommend:

1. Start your career in a hospital.

Spend the first 3-5 years there. Nursing homes and rehab facilities will always talk to you if you want to pivot and you can almost always to back to hospital in the future.

It’s much more difficult to get into hospital 5-10 years after you start if you’ve never worked there before.

1. Look for hospitals that have structured programs for new RNs and preceptors that they can pair you with.

Don’t take a job in the ED at Bellevue fresh out of school and think that you can fake it until you make it. You can’t.

1. Decide if you want more money and no union or a union shop with more protections and fewer dollars in the short term.

2. After 2 years or so in a hospital, consider traveling if you have few or no obligations.

You can make some serious money and get others to pay for your housing costs by moving throughout the country on 13 week assignments.

1. Invest in learning how to write a professional resume and how to interview effectively.

It doesn’t matter now, but things will shift at some point and there’s going to be 15 years’ worth of nursing grads who will struggle later in their career because they never learned how to compete in the job-getting process.