Ask an NP – Most and Least Useful Things I Learned in NP School

00:01 So in all my experience as a nurse practitioner, the skills that I've used the most that I actually received in training have probably been surrounding just the basic knowledge of how the body works like going back to patho.

00:14 Even and like, you know, disease processes, how they affect the body and like a chronic way, I think that's been the thing I do the most, because in primary care, we just teaching you like, "Hey, this is what's happening to your body." So a lot of those like education skills, like I thought I was maybe going to be out here making a lot more nuanced decisions and crazy like diet, like, let me figure out, almost like you're on a hunt for what this person has, and how we're going to diagnose, and how we're going to treat it? And the reality is, most of primary care as an FNP is a lot of education on very basic body systems, and how they work and how we can keep it healthy.

00:48 And I definitely thought I would be doing a lot more skills, suturing, injections, biopsies, cutting, you know, all like the procedural skills.

00:57 But it turns out, like, if you hate that, like I do, you can actually steer in a com like as long as there's other people in the office who enjoy that type of thing, you almost can like, swap with them.

01:07 Like the woman I worked with, she loved that type of thing.

01:10 And I was able to divert all of that and I was like, just send me all of your Pap smears.

01:14 And that was our trade, literally.

01:16 That's so know that you can kind of make find what you like to do in practice and tailor it to that.

01:22 And really, the thing you're going to be the best at is what you've been doing since you've already been a nurse, which is educating people and you already know how to do that. So that's a bonus.