Traveling Nurse, Cori Stone, NICU - The Atlas Life #69

Braden Boex: Hi, I'm Braden Boex. I'm a recruiter here with Atlas. I have Cory Stone whose a NICU nurse that I work with that's here in Omaha, on the way from Northern Virginia to Modesto, California.

Cori Stone: Yep. When I got into travel nursing to begin with, I knew at some point I'd be heading out West just because that seems like a good spot for travel nursing. There's a lot of fun stuff to do out there when you're not working and they also typically have crisis rates, which was appealing, certainly. I am a number of things. I'm excited, I'm nervous, I'm scared I'm going to miss my cats and my boyfriend, but mostly my cats. But no, it's a leap of faith and everything so far travel nursing wise and Atlas wise has been wonderful so I expect the same from this assignment.

Cori Stone: Something that was challenging I think about my first assignment is just that it was totally new. I had two days of orientation, which is very different from a staff nursing orientation. But at that point I had been a NICU nurse for about three years and I knew the NICU ropes. It was just understanding the different nuances of that hospital. So I guess I'd say that's probably one of the things that I found a little bit more difficult right at the start. But something that I enjoyed and that was fun was I made a ton of friends, friends that I plan on keeping in touch with for a very long time. And eventually, since I live in Virginia, I expect that I'll end up taking a staff position there, a couple of years down the road cause I'm not done traveling yet.

Braden Boex: Anybody that has worked with Kaiser knows that it's a little bit of chaos because Kaiser is very particular about what they want. There's a number of Kaiser hospitals up and down California and so we kind of just started submitting to one and then if for some reason that didn't work out or the process happened, the way the process happened, we would just kind of pivot and move to the next place until finally somewhere stuck. And that's how we found Modesto.

Cori Stone: I think my next venture after California, I'll be there from July 7th through October 5th, around that timeframe. I think I'll probably either look at another contract in California or try and find something local. I think it'll just depend on where I'm at, at that point, but it'll probably be one of those two options.

Braden Boex: Either one side of the country or the other, like there's no middle..

Cori Stone: Maybe not in the middle. I don't know. I guess we'll figure that out. I have three months to figure it out. I'm traveling with a friend of mine that I worked with when I was a staff nurse in Northern Virginia and we plan hopefully to try and stack our shifts together as best we can. And then on the days that we're not working, we hope to travel all around California and maybe go to Maui at one point. We'll see. We have lots of plans.