I haven’t really been to the east coast. I have been to NY once for a middle school trip. However, being 13 (ish) I didn’t have the freedom to do what I wanted. Before heading for Vermont for extern. I flew from Oregon to Florida- because that is where my family who lives in Vermont was at. I hadn’t taken any gap years between high school and college and thought the two-week trip from Florida to Vermont would be exciting! We spent a few days in Florida and then worked our way up from there to VT. It took us about four days to get from Florida to VT. We stopped at every welcome center we could find. I wasn’t even aware that was a thing coming from the west coast. That was the best mini road trip ever. However, to be fair I have not done a road trip like that before.
Monday (July 1st) was my first day at work (extern but for conversation purposes I will call it work). Now I can’t say what happened for privacy purposes. However, I can say it was amazing and I learned way more than expected. I saw a surgery loads of different studies and I even got to perform some- with supervision of course, given I am still a student. Although it was way more than I thought I was going to be able to do come week one.
One thing I can mention though is the five stages of getting from student to technologist. I was in stage one the first three days. Stage one is where you feel unstoppable and you can do anything. I was way better than I expected and felt on top of the world. However, then day four came. I jumped on a study that one of the techs asked me to help him with. I started and had first impressions it would be a fairly easy scan. Then I stared, and boy was I wrong. It was just not working for me. I felt like I was questioning everything I new and wondering why I thought I could do this career. However, then the more experienced tech took over and finished the exam. Upon finishing, after the patient had left he said “Congrats you hit stage two.” Stage two is when the student questions everything they know and find and easy study hard. This was very discouraging. However, after talking to the technologist and him telling me that everyone has gone through it I felt a little better. In fact by the end of the day he wanted me to try again because he said I will do better on the next one. To my surprise, later that day I scanned another patient and I was better. Still not as confident as day one, because of the struggle that morning. However, it really helped to see I could improve within hours. Since then I am now excited to go back to work on Monday and see more improvement until I can do a full scan by myself in a reasonable amount of time. At this point I go fairly slow to make sure I don’t miss anything.