The Atlas Life #63 - NICU RN, Cori Stone

Braden Boex: Hi, I'm Braden Boex. I'm a recruiter with Atlas MedStaff. I met Cori, I posted a job on social media that was kind of in the DC area that she was looking for, and she was having trouble, she was trying to get started as a traveler and so we just kind of connected about this job, asked her some questions and went from there.

Braden Boex: Cori makes my life really easy because Cori's like a super planner. So she has this plan of what she wants to do like months down the road. She as a newer travel isn't 100% sure how to implement that plan, but she has it. It's easy working with Cori, like I would think of her as a friend, as much as I would somebody that I work with.

Braden Boex: Cori has some fantastic experience in the NICU. Her profile and her resume is just fantastic. And the way that she goes about planning and preparing, she's going to set our mind on 50 States and she could go to all 50 States.

Cori Stone: So my name's Cori Stone. I work in the NICU. That's my specialty. I've been a nurse for just over six years and a traveler for since February, so we'll say four months or so. I'm currently at Children's National, in their NICU in Washington DC. I first met Braden on Facebook actually, it was the premium NICU travel assignments, I believe that was the name of the Facebook group, and I met him through there.

Cori Stone: Right now I'm unmarried, I have no children and it just seemed like the perfect opportunity to do it. I've loved to travel personally, so I figured now was as good a time as any, probably the best time for me to do it before settling down. Honestly, I have so many positives to say about traveling so far. Braden's been wonderful. He's been very, very helpful, my recruiter. The money's not half bad.

Cori Stone: I've made a lot of new friends at my current assignment in Children's in DC. The flexibility has been great. The scheduling, something I didn't expect because I've really not had any negatives. I've floated probably more than I was initially expecting when I got into travel nursing to begin with, which is fine because I plan on going back to school sometime in the near future and the float experience and PQ and cardiac ICU is something that I need anyways, so certainly not a negative, it's a positive. Especially for my wanting to go back to school, but it was unexpected when I initially got into travel nursing.

Cori Stone: The positive for me, it's close to home. I live in Virginia, so it's more of a local contract for me, so I'm able to commute back and forth for the most part. I'm very familiar with the area, there's a ton of stuff to do in the Northern Virginia DC area. I would say one of the negatives is there's a ton of traffic. From what I understand, LA is the only rival in terms of the amount of traffic in the area, but there's so much to do. I'm close to family, I've made a lot of new friends. It's such a transient area that a lot of people are here for just a short period of time, so it's very easy to make friends.

Cori Stone: I think the best experience I've had so far is, it probably had been on my current unit with my current contract that I had a really good rapport with the family that I was working with. Their baby was one of my patients, and by the end of my shift we just, we got along very well. They were very appreciative of the extra work that I had done for them, to make them comfortable in addition to caring for their baby. And they asked me at the end of the shift for my information so that they could speak to the manager and let them know how helpful they were, and they talked about the process of recommending me for a DAISY award, so that was wonderful, I loved that.

Cori Stone: Especially having been on the unit for a couple of weeks, that made me feel really good, and it kind of solidified my wanting to go the travel route, because I was worried since I would only be there for a short period of time, I wouldn't have the opportunity to build rapport over a long period of time with families and it's turned out that that's not the case at all.

Cori Stone: The one thing that's been the most difficult to learn, maybe having two days orientation, which is of course different for travelers and then not learning NICUs specific things. Because frankly when you've been a nurse in your specialty for long enough, you understand the way NICUs work generally. But I would say maybe the different nuances and a new hospital that you're having to learn very quickly in order to get the job done on very minimal orientation time.

Cori Stone: So I extended my current contract an additional six weeks, so I'll be at Children's National until the end of June, June 30th. And then the plan is to wait for my friend who is getting into travel, she's actually going to be working with you guys as well, with Braden. She is pending her California license, and then our plan is to hit the LA area for my next contract, it'll be about 13 weeks there.

Speaker 3: You're going from one traffic jam to another then.

Cori Stone: Basically. Apparently I like traffic more than I let on.