The Atlas Life #62 - ER RN, Jen Linnan

Mike Von Dollen: I met Jen... Actually, she was handed over to me from another recruiter who moved on to another division, so I was blessed to have her come over to my desk.

Mike Von Dollen: The transition actually went really well because she's just a really outgoing, great person, so I just feel like we hit it off right off the bat. And joked around a little bit, had some fun, figured out who she is, what she's doing, where she wants to go next, that sort of thing.

Mike Von Dollen: She likes the outdoors so she works hard but then she makes sure she really takes in where she's at. So she goes out, she checks out everything there is to do in the town and she makes the best of it.

Mike Von Dollen: Ask her about her trip to Roswell and all the interesting people she saw, and if she believes in aliens.

Jen Linnan: My name is Jen Linnan, I've been traveling for about a year now, and my specialty is ER. And right now I'm in Columbia, South Carolina. I actually originally started nursing back in New York where I got my nursing license and then my sister had my first niece, so I left home to help with my niece and they were far away in Kentucky. So I went to Kentucky and then they wanted to move back to Cleveland and I was like, "You know what, I'm going to start traveling. I'll be okay with skipping a couple cold Rochester winters." It's been two years since I left New York doing that so it's been a good move for me.

Jen Linnan: Originally, I was a surgical floor nurse, so when I moved to Kentucky the past two years, that's when I switched to doing ER specialty. Even as a nurse who had had six, seven years of experience switching to the ER, I felt brand new again. So anytime you change your specialty, or patient population, or your focus of your own career, you always have to start back to being brand new. So even though you have all this experience in one aspect of the field to move around and change, there's always new things to learn.

Jen Linnan: The best part would definitely be, besides the friends you make everywhere you go, your days off are kind of like vacation days. I compare it to maybe having four weeks of vacation in a year. In a regular staffing job, now you can have four days of vacation and maybe go somewhere that you would have to take a week off beforehand. But now you can take a day trip or make a long weekend out of a trip that you maybe wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

Jen Linnan: My least favorite part is trying to find decent housing. I know that option is either you guys set it up for us or we can find our own. It is helpful to know people in different places, but sometimes that can be stressful and things can fall through quickly so that would be the hardest part. But definitely worth it in that.

Jen Linnan: I just came back from Arizona and I did a couple of trips up there, went to the grand Canyon, up to Page, to Horseshoe Bend, but my trip back was actually pretty long. We did Sedona, Grand Canyon, up to Southern Colorado and we did Mesa Verde. Just the fact that that was just my trip back was two weeks of doing whatever I wanted to do and going wherever I wanted to go was super fun.

Jen Linnan: I made it a point to go drive through Roswell on my way through because you never know. I didn't have that UFO museum so... I did go to it when I left, the museum. It's kind of cool. When I left, I called my sister and I was like, "I don't know. Am I supposed to have more questions than answers leaving because now I do?" Are aliens real? You don't know. So it's a difference of viewpoint down there for sure.

Jen Linnan: For me, I'm such a little travel bug that I could see myself doing this until I wanted to really settle down and go back into the education role. But like I said, there's so much to learn that every contract I do, not only am I learning stuff specifically to take care of my patients, but also just how different organizations work in going from place to place. There's so much to learn. I'm just loving what I'm doing right now that I'm okay with where I'm at and not having a potential plan to settle down anytime soon.