Nursing Alumnae Pay It Forward With Helpful Reference Website

After spending years studying and preparing to become a nurse practitioner (NP), you’ve finally reached your goal.  You’ve taken your boards and passed and you are officially a practitioner.  What do you do now? 

Well, the obvious answer includes some job searching and maybe some well-earned relaxation, but three new NPs decided to spend their energy helping others. 

Sarah Oppenheim, Emily Rodda and Shawna Mitchell Sisler got together the summer after graduation and put together a website filled with all of the links, references and knowledge they had gleaned from their UCSF training experience, and npstudent.com came into being.

 “I couldn’t think of a better way to ‘pay it forward,’” said Oppenheim. “The site gave me something productive to occupy my free time with as well as an outlet for cataloging resources and references that I'd saved throughout my time as a student at UCSF.”   

Sisler, who had approached Oppenheim about starting the site, said she wanted a catalog of all the best resources they had come across in their graduate school education.

“Every professor, preceptor and colleague had something great to add to the list,” said Sisler.  “Once I found a compatible platform for the site, it built itself. The three of us were able to take a basic structure and make it our very best study guide we’ve ever made.”

The site is a well-designed resource for pediatric nurse practitioners.  The navigation bar at the top links you to Well-Child Check, Study by System, Meds, SOAP Notes and more.  There is a fantastic list of resources and useful links for Flashcards and Medical Spanish. 

“I think one of the most helpful sections of the website is the ‘Study by System’ section,” said Rodda. “We really put a lot of care into including conditions that are essential for students in pediatric primary care rotations. You can go to a system and see a well-selected list of conditions that can help you organize a differential — and better yet, click on a condition and learn more about its diagnosis and management!” 

Rodda added, “Now that I’m working, I have NP Student opened on my computer all day. It's the mother lode of pediatric primary care resources that we never had the time to create while we were in school.”

So, for all future nurse practitioners out there (and really anyone interested in pediatric care), check it out http://www.npstudent.com/.  There is a Facebook page, too, at https://www.facebook.com/npstudent. 

It also can make you start to think.  What can I do after graduation to help and inspire those still trudging through the trenches of grad school?