Why Most Applicants Don’t Get Into CRNA School—and How to Stand Out (With Dr. Jason Bolt)

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All right, welcome back to Club Nurse, everybody. This is Colton, your host. I have with me a guest today that I think everybody's gonna get some really good information from. I've actually been following Jason on social media for quite some time. He is a CRNA and he has a bunch of just really good knowledge tools and just like ways to kind of navigate the world of being a CRNA, getting into CRNA school. So I'm super excited to have you here, Jason. If you don't mind just kind of introducing yourself, what exactly you do in the nursing world.

Sure. Yeah. So I'm Dr. Jason Bolton. I actually work as a nurse anesthesiologist in, well, I was gonna say the Bay Area, but I actually just moved. I, I moved from San Francisco down to LA. So now I work in LA and, uh, I started off doing hospital work like most people do. So I worked as a CRNA in bigger hospital systems and doing on-call and staying 24 hours in the hospital doing OB and C-sections and general surgeries and stuff. But now the last couple years, I just do contract work. So I do like plastic surgery or orthopedic surgeries or, you know, private practice type settings, surgery centers. So easier schedules. And for me, the work is a little more fulfilling.

How's the, how's the adjustment been from the Bay Area to LA?

It's been good.

Big adjustment?

No, not bad.

I mean, it's since we traveled to— me and my partner would go down to LA like once every 2 or 3 months before from San Francisco. It was like a 6-hour drive. So I feel Disney— I had a Disneyland annual pass. So I feel like we were down here all the time. But it's different to actually live here and be amongst it and to like battle the traffic on a Tuesday afternoon, just trying to go to the grocery store and get back home. Like that is the next level of, you know, getting used to the system here. And it is stressful. But, you know, the Bay Area doesn't have perfect traffic either. So I have to say, you know, people, if you've lived in Atlanta or New York or Chicago, like, you know, Traffic is not great. So LA— I'm in Boston, so it's like, yeah, Boston is not great, but LA takes it that extra notch even worse a little bit. So you're like, wow, you guys.

I hear from people that I know out there that like you want to try to live, work, and like function in like a little bubble that you're in so you're not having to commute as much. But with the work you do, you're not just working at like one place, right? You're kind of all over the place.

So yeah, yeah, yeah.

So kind of take us— I'm curious, take us back to, um, like when you got into nursing school. and you were going the nursing route, like, was being a CRNA something that you always wanted to do, or was it something that you learned about while going to school? Was it when you were already like an established RN? How did that go kind of for you?

Yeah, so I actually was pre-med and determined that I would do nursing school as part of my pre-med track. And I was, I was gonna, you know, finish nursing school and then pretty much go straight into medical school. And while in medical school, work part-time as a nurse to help make money. I wanted a degree that would teach me not only some clinical skills, but also some like anatomy, physiology, microbiology, some of the core things that I wanted to study, sciences that were more like human, you know, related sciences. And I felt like nursing tied into that really well. But what was funny, and at the time I thought I was going to be an endocrinologist or neurologist, and now in retrospect, I would never want those 2 specialties. I don't know why I thought I liked that. I think I thought the thyroid was an interesting organ or something. But 20, 21 years old, you really are not— brain's not fully Developed yet.

No idea what you want to do. Yeah.

Yeah. You're, you're just pulling at things. But anyway, I, um, I got into nursing school and I met a CRNA in second semester during a surgical rotation. And it was the first time I'd ever really seen anesthesia being done. It's the first time I ever thought about anesthesia. I don't have anyone in my personal life who I grew up around that did anesthesia and I was never exposed to it. I never had any surgeries or anything as a younger person. So it never was something I even considered, but by watching him perform a nerve block and then go through the whole, like, being at the head of the bed, inducing, managing airways, being with the patient during a really stressful time, I realized, man, that is something fascinating to me. And the fact that the patient was able to wake up at the end and feel totally fine, even though I watched that patient get completely cut open and what should have killed someone and used to would have killed people before we had proper anesthesia, I just thought, man, that's like magic to me. And I want to know more about that. And yeah, that began my journey to switch into the CRNA role.

Nice. So yeah, I feel like when I, when I think back to like nursing school, I feel like it's almost like a bug. There's like buzzword now that everyone's like, oh, I want to go to be, I want to be a CRNA. And I feel like it's before even people realize what the CRNA does. And I think it's because of the, I mean, everybody knows that CRNAs make a substantial amount more money than a bedside RN. And so I think everyone just kind of has this idea of like, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna graduate nursing school. I'm gonna go get whatever experience I need and then get straight into CRNA. So I love to hear that you actually were just like inspired by the work and that's kind of what got you. Into it. And then actually kind of to touch on this, I feel like most nursing students don't get that opportunity to shadow a CRNA. And I actually kind of uniquely had that as well. I remember one time at like a rural hospital, um, in Arizona where I went to school, me and one of my classmates, uh, were able to shadow a CRNA for the day. So I feel like it's like really cool experience to actually get to, get to see. Do you ever get nursing students with you in anything that you've done? I guess probably not in the outpatient setting, but like when you were in the hospital.

I did before. Yeah. Which I always took the advantage of that situation to kind of talk to them. And I always remember in the back of my mind that this was me not that long ago. I guess it was longer than I think it was, but I guess 15 years ago, but to me it feels like 4 years ago. So I try and think, you know, I was here not long ago and I needed someone to kind of just show me what was going on. And it inspired me to completely pivot to a different career, one that I'm happily in now. And I do get like, I will say in the surgery centers, the nurses, their children often do come into the center. So if you have like that, you don't get like nursing students from just like local universities who are dropping in for clinicals, but you get a lot of like surgeons' kids, nurses' kids. Like everybody's, like everybody's neighbor's child or whatever, who knows the nurse manager at the surgery center they're in. And they often do shadow me and they do.

That's cool. You still get like mentorship.

Yeah, they're looking for a little bit of mentorship unofficially. They're looking for a little bit of an inside scoop of what's going on. And yeah, I'll say back in the day, not many people knew about CRNAs. Like when I was thinking about it or met a CRNA for the first time in 2010, there wasn't Instagram. There wasn't like— YouTube was just a little funny goofy clips. There was not like videos out there about this career. There was none of that information. So you, if you knew about a CRNA, it was probably because you knew one. It was almost never talked about. Talked about or heard, heard of really. And even in school, in nursing school, no one ever— you talk about nurse practitioners and other things, but no one ever talked about a CRNA. So you had to meet one in a live environment back then really to get, you know, kind of know. Yeah. But you're right. Nowadays I feel like a lot, partially because of me and all the other social media CRNAs out there, we've kind of made it much more visible. And unfortunately, I think you're right for the money purposes, which is not the way you want to choose a career. And it's right. Yeah. Definitely going to make you an unhappy person through this whole journey.

Especially in the medical field.

Yeah. Yeah. And the medical field where you're, you're really there for other people, their whole job's about the patient, not, not the cash that you could make from the situation.

No, I love that. Um, so kind of tell us exactly like your kind of share your own personal journey of how exactly, how many years did you have to work? Did you go straight into the ICU? Did you kind of know, like you're saying now there's social media, people kind of know like the roadmap that you, you know, there's, yes, there's different ways to get there, but You know, there's a roadmap out there for people now. Like, if you do these things, you know, you most likely can get into a school. So back then when you were going through this, did you start ICU and just start going for it, or how did that really work for you?

Yeah, so I mean, we— I did know from asking that CRNA, and even back then the requirement was the same, ICU experience a few years at least. And, uh, and so I wanted to do the ICU anyway because I really To be frank, I don't like more than 2 patients at a time in any situation. And anesthesia, that is something that I do like about our career is that it is one patient at a time. You focus on one person, that's it. So if you love your one-on-one patients, that's your, that's your anesthesia pathway. But yeah, I liked when I did rotations and we did certain, you know, we did med-surg floors and things like that where you were juggling 6 or 8 patients in Alabama. Oh, that's a lot. I don't even understand how you're from— Yeah, that's where I trained. So, I mean, you're talking about the real rough, like 8 patients definitely was the norm on med-surg, sometimes 9. And so, yeah, I mean, a girl that I dated at the back in nursing school, she was working on med-surg when we graduated. I was working ICU, she did med-surg. And so I had 2, sometimes 3 patients, and she would have 8, sometimes 9 patients. And I don't even know, I don't even comprehend how she managed to keep up with those people. And it's just not safe. And I knew that wasn't for me. So I knew I wanted to do the ICU to have less patients so I could focus in on those patients. But also I wanted to take care of people who were truly critically ill.

Mm-hmm.

And I knew really needed me and their pathophysiology and their situation would be a challenge and something engaging for my mind every day to go in there and be, you know, interested in something new happening. And it just so happened to also be something required for CRNA school. But yeah, I, I was passionate about the ICU and I loved the ICU and I did 4 years before I went back to school.

So, okay. So you did 4 years before, so did you start applying like around like year 3 or how, how did you do that?

Yeah. So I knew that I wanted to do 2 years as staff ICU nurse and then 2 years as a travel nurse. I kind of had a game plan set up from like, from really nursing school. I set up a game plan to like, okay, you're gonna finish CRNA school in 2019. It's 2011. This is the years you're going to be doing these things. And I pretty much did it to that, to that level. So I did 2 years staff and then I did 2 years traveling and I wanted to do 2 years travel nursing. So one, I wanted to make money, but 2, I wanted to go have fun, enjoy different areas of the country. I wanted to meet new people. I wanted to see different ways that people practiced medicine in the ICU, because it does, it changes from Connecticut to San Francisco to Texas. Find very different ways things are done. And I think that's interesting to be dynamic and learn. Not everything has to be the way that your hospital at this one place, at your level 1 trauma center, that's an academic hospital, does everything a certain way. There's completely different ways to do it. And I think it's important that you go learn that and go experience those things.

Yeah.

Yeah. Not, not to just think that, you know, everything's just like one way.

Um, yeah.

So it kind of seems like you were like ahead of the trends of all these things. Like you were ahead of the CRNA trends, the head of the, uh, like the travel nursing trend. Before all these things.

Oh yeah. People still like travel nursing back then, but it wasn't as paid. Like it wasn't crazily high paid, especially when you started getting up towards the later 2010s and then into COVID when it blew up because everybody went travel nursing for the cash then. Right. I mean, okay. Yeah. I mean, I would have too back then. I mean, if I was working as a nurse, go do it. Because if you're going to be suffering, you might as well get paid.

Might as well.

Yeah.

I don't even think that, I mean, I don't even think the contracts now are even, I mean, probably depending on where you are in the country, you probably still are making a little bit more money, but it's not, definitely not like what it was like during COVID That was a, that was a special time for, for making money, at least as a bedside nurse.

Yeah. It was very good for bedside nursing.

That's for sure. Kind of take us through, like, what exactly do you have to do as far as what are the, you know, like I said, I know that there are different requirements for different schools. Give us kind of the basics of somebody that's wanting to go into CRNA school. Say they're a nursing student right now, if you're kind of drawing out like, these are the things that the main points you need to hit in order to give yourself the best chance, what are you telling them?

Sure. So I actually, I do mock interviews and I mentor people in certain ways. So this is like right up my alley because I kind of recite this thing to a lot of people quite often. First thing you want to focus in on if you're in nursing school is you want to make sure you have good grades. Your GPA will affect how competitive you are. Is it the only thing that will affect it? No. So don't get caught up in, I have to have a 4.0, but you do need to have a pretty If your overall cumulative is lower than a 3.4, you really need to be assessing what happened here and how do I fix this. And your sciences really need to be really probably A's. If you can't have all A's in your core sciences, they need to be like mostly A's, a couple B's. If you got C's, go ahead and write that down to retake it. Like if you made a C in chemistry and a C in micro and you like barely got into nursing school because of these grades, you're probably not gonna get into CRNA school with these scores. So go ahead while you're in undergrad still, go ahead and start scheduling. Retake those classes. Scheduling that to retake it.

Yeah.

And make an A in it. Beyond that, you have to work in the ICU. The most recent statistic I saw of students accepted into CRNA school had 2.7 or 2.9 years of experience. So a lot of people hear, oh, you just have to have 1 year and I can apply. You can do that. It doesn't mean you're gonna get in.

Sure. Odds.

Yeah.

It means you're allowed to apply, but you probably still won't get in with 1 year cuz that's the bare minimum to apply.

And it's not— And they want, and they want ICU. So like, so ER's not necessarily counted or no?

No. Okay.

And why?

What's the, what's the reason?

The reasoning is in the ER, you are not taking patients that are critical and maintaining them and titrating meds on them and managing them all through the day without sending them up or standing them. Yeah. So the ER, the job is like holdover and get them out of there. Your job is not like treating and managing and like long-term dealing with chronic complex issues. And you're also, you're always going to have an ER doctor and nurse practitioner, people like they're kind of managing everything for you in the ICU, at least the ones I worked in. And There are some that have people just stationed there, but at least when I worked in the ICU, you, you were there kind of managing patients throughout the day or the night without somebody standing there holding a decision over you and saying, we should do this, or we should do that. You would have titratable meds. You would make decisions. If the blood pressure is going down, you would go up on this. If there were labs needed, you would put it in the order. Like you would, you would kind of function very autonomously in a way that you really don't get to do as a nurse anywhere else in the hospital. You're given a lot more leeway. And maybe in some ERs you're allowed to do that, but the ones that I floated to or worked in, usually not, because there's always a physician right there or their PA or NP, and they're always making decisions of what should be happening and what's going on. And you're usually not managing multiple drips and titrating up and down on lots of stuff through the day because your job is to get them in and get them somewhere else. So that's kind of the mentality. And you really shouldn't have like vented patients long-term unless it was an emergency. You just tubed them and then you're just managing the airway for a short amount of time. But in the ICU, a lot of your patients, or maybe all of them, can be intubated and have advanced airways and have lots of different complicated respiratory physiology going on. And you really need to have experience with that, not just a little bit, but like a lot of that experience to start getting ready for CRNA school.

Gotcha. So that's the reason, the distinction between ICU, ER for CRNA school. I think that— I mean, I've spent most of my career in the ER. It is true, like, it is very facility dependent. On what you're really doing as far as managing the patients. I mean, I have worked somewhere where, I mean, you are taking care of, you know, patients that are on a ventilator, multiple drips for hours because there's no beds. And this especially happened during COVID The ERs were actually functioning really as like many different units. Like you would have like these holds of these patients that were med-surg PCU. You'd have these ICU patients that, like I'm saying, are vented and all these drips that you're taking care of for multiple hours. And it, yes, it really depends on where you're working because there are places I've been that are the providers always there. They're the ones that are kind of running the show for everything. Then I've been places where the nurses have a ton more autonomy, and I think that's really just really any any department kind of depends on the facility that you're working at. I had like a very short window of my career where I was like, "I think I'm going to go to." I had this like idea I wanted to be a CRNA as well, and so I had left. This was right. This was actually still during the pandemic. I had done my last like travel assignment. Went to the ICU. I hated it. I absolutely hated it. I was like, I cannot, I cannot do this. I apparently obviously did not want to be a CRNA bad enough. 'Cause I was like, I cannot do this. Went back to the ER.

It's definitely, it's 2 different mindset. Like it's very different brains. I find that most people who do well in the ER don't do well in the ICU. And most people who do well in the ICU don't do well in the ER. 'Cause it's, it's very different perspectives. It's different ways of workflow, the focus, the attention to detail, things like that. There's no way you can do that in the ED Because your, your job is to like get patients in and get them out and get a new one in and someone else in. And you're juggling a lot of different random things from a child who, you know, had some burn or something to like an old person that fell to a lot of different random stuff. So as an ICU nurse, you're supposed to come in, you get 1 or 2 patients and you know everything about that, those 2 patients. You know when the last time they tied their shoe, you know, when everything happened with them, even to an extreme point.

Yeah.

And in that attention to detail and that, like, that super hyper-focused vigilance type thing that translates into the anesthesia world, because then you want to take that on with each case you have where you're really zoned in on that one thing. But it's funny because we do cycle patients often. Like today I had 5 different patients.

Oh wow.

So I was hyper-focused in on someone, but only for an hour and a half. And then it's the next one. So it's like a constant rotation. So it's a little bit of a blend of the ER mentality and ICU a little bit once you get into the anesthesia world. And when I think about it like that, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

I can totally see that. You were telling us kind of like the tips that you would give to a nursing student. So with these people that you're helping, as far as like a mock interview, what are, what are you preparing them for? Why is there such an emphasis on, on the interview process? Like, is it really that daunting? Are these questions like clinical type questions or these like personality type questions? Like, what are they really kind of asking you generally?

Sure, it's both actually, and that's what can make it complicated. It's emotional intelligence that's going to be a very big focus on almost all schools' interview processes, and it is so competitive. That's what makes the interview process so difficult is that you know that there might be 500 people who applied, and they're going to interview maybe 150 of those 500. So you— a lot of people will not even get asked to interview, period.

Yeah.

at the school. And out of the 150 that they're going to talk to in person, they're probably going to take 25 of those.

Wow.

So, and those 150 were already the ones who on paper looked really good, who should, you know, feasibly all technically be able to get in. But something you say in that interview, something you do, something— a personality, lots of different emotional intelligence— these things all will factor into out of like those 125, 150 people they actually talk to, the 25 they pick. And it's very competitive. It's very hard to get in. And a lot of people get rejected many times. I got rejected twice before I got in my third time. And I had a high— I had a 4.0 science GPA. I thought I had 4 years of ICU. I did cardiac and neuro and medical and surgical. I had got my CCRN certification. I had done volunteer work at a medical free clinic for the homeless. Like, I had done all the hoops. I had jumped through everything.

Yeah.

And I got turned away. And I was told, you know, at one school that it was because I took my suit jacket off and they didn't think that that was professional because I was getting hot. I was told that maybe I wouldn't like the weather where their school was located because I grew up in an area that was warmer than this colder climate that I interviewed at. Like, there's a lot of just random things that you can say or do without realizing it in an interview that actually kind of takes points off of your, of your status.

That's very interesting. Did you— do you recommend people that come to you to have like multiple schools in mind that they're applying to? And if you do, how many do you generally recommend? And on top of that, are most schools on kind of the same cycle? Is it once a year, or do they do like— trying to remember— like the fall and then like a spring session that they'll take students?

They're almost all once a year, so— but they admit at different times. There are some schools that do their admission start of the programs in January. There are a lot that do them in May, and then there's quite a few others that do them in August. So, they'll all be interviewing at different time periods through the year. And then, once they interview people, they may decide, we want these people. They may lock you down, but it might be 6 to 8 to 10 months later before you actually begin your first day of class.

Okay.

So, they're usually— they're fairly far ahead of the curve trying to, like, iron out the next year's class. But I tell people, you want minimum of 3, probably 3 to 5 schools that are your top picks that you're ready to apply for and put in your applications that you think you're highly competitive for. and that you're excited about going to. Because if you are a great applicant and you apply to 3 schools, you'll be lucky to get into one. You're going to be really, really lucky if you get into 2 or 3. Unfortunately, quite a few people don't get into any. And so then it's time to go to round 2. And next year, we'll go back to the drawing board and figure out where are we making a mistake? What happened? What went wrong? And how can we fix that?

Man, that's a grueling process. Is there also— I'm trying to like, like remember these things back from when I was like looking into all these recommendations— or not recommendations, these requirements. Are there also letters of recommendation that you're needing, references? Like what else is like included in that like total package that you need to finally like submit my application?

So you'd have to do shadowing hours. You have to have documented hours of shadowing a CRNA and being able to— best case scenario is they write you a letter of recommendation. You need 3 letters of recommendation for most schools from different people. Some schools specify we want one to be from your nursing manager in the ICU. Some will specify we want one of the intensive care doctors to write you a letter, and others will say we also want a CRNA that you shadow to write you a letter. So those are your typical 3 that they are— will kind of say we want these 3 specific ones. Beyond that, you need your critical care certification to apply. Most schools want you to have taken the GRE examination, which is a terrible long test that has nothing to do with anything medical. And you might have to spend a long time studying studying for that and still may not do too well. I did mediocre on it and I studied quite a bit. Usually some kind of volunteer work, extracurricular things, things that make you stand out or seem interesting. If you were a college soccer player, maybe teaching the Boys and Girls Club of America, maybe you're a part-time soccer coach for those kids or something. I've seen those types of volunteer work or the American Red Cross or something that shows back that you're involved in the community, you do extra things, you don't just go to work, clock in, clock out, and that's all you care about. And then research is always nice. If you've been published in your research or you've been a research assistant on something, that's always good because of course all CRNA programs are doctoral, and it's nice for you to have on paper that you already are part of the research process. You understand how research works and you understand how to like go through literature reviews and, and what's, what's strong research and weak research and things like that.

It's a lot. I understand why, because I mean, obviously with this many applicants and things, like, you have to You have to make it almost this difficult to even apply to kind of weed out the people that probably should not be applying to these programs. So when somebody comes to you looking for your help, how do you exactly set this up? Do you offer sessions right now? How do people find like, okay, I'm ready to kind of go through this interview process, and they come to you? Do you set up to give them X amount of video calls that you do these mock interviews, or how do you kind of run that with them?

Sure. So I have a Calendly link and they, it's, it's a link in my bio on my Instagram, um, uh, @boltcrna. You can just go there and click the link and there's a place for you to schedule. I have very limited time because I work clinically. So I might have 6 or 8 slots maximum for the whole month. And, uh, and those will book out usually a month in advance. And, and if you book one of those slots, once you do that, it's going to go ahead and auto-email you like a 26-page study guide.

Yeah.

That's going to give you a lot of different information that I know that can be very helpful for emotional intelligence, pharmacology, critical care questions, things like that. And I've used that for years to help people get into school. And then once you're studying all of those things, you're going to bring that information with you day of for your mock interview with me. And we're going to have 60 to maybe 70 minutes of face-to-face time where we're going to go through our mock interview. I'm gonna see how you do, then I'm gonna give you feedback on that and then tell— and then give you the chance to ask me questions. And then that's it. That's the whole, you know, process.

I feel like that's probably, uh, very like a great feeling for you. Like when you have people that come to you, clients, and then they like, you know, text or DM you or whatever, like, oh my God, I got in. Like that's gotta be a very like a fulfilling thing to be like, oh, you know, that's great. I'm glad I could be a part of that journey to kind of help you. I'm sure that— I'm sure that you remember exactly that feeling of when you got into your, to your program.

It's such an exciting time. You never forget the moment you were at when you get that phone call and you're told you're going to get in because obviously you work so hard to get in. And a lot of us face rejection one or two or more times before you finally do get in. So you're already kind of crestfallen and feeling like maybe you're a loser, maybe you're not smart enough.

Yeah.

You really start doubting yourself. I did at one point after the second time I didn't get in. I thought like, is this actually for me? Like, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I really am not smart enough. Maybe I can't do this. And, uh, and then it was the third school that I interviewed at, it clicked. And I got the phone call from the program director after the interview, like a couple of days later. And I was on the unit of the ICU in Long Beach on a travel contract. And I had to like go into the bathroom and like chill myself out because I was like about to cry because I just knew like my life was just changed. It's one of those pivot moments where you're like, my life is about to completely change and I'm about to go like a whole different direction than what I was.

Yeah.

That's a huge deal. That's a huge deal. Did you have to, uh, because I know that these, these programs don't allow you to work, right? Like during them you can't, you like, you really don't have the time. Is the schooling as grueling as they, as like you make it seem? Like as like you hear about like, oh, CRNA school, like you can't do anything, you have no life. Like is it that grueling? Or—

I say probably true. Unfortunately, it's, it's pretty, pretty grueling. It depends on your personality and it depends on the way that you want to perceive the world. I mean, yeah, there are people out there who can tell you that no matter what they've been through, they've been fine. And it's okay. And they chilled out and they made it work and blah, blah, blah. But I would say that's probably not the experience 99% of people will experience. And so I like to tell people like, plan to be the 99%, plan to not be that 1% person who like goes on social media and is like, it was good. I went on, I went to Denver and skied all the time and blah, blah, blah. I was like, yeah, and you probably almost failed a few times and you're not telling that part.

Yeah.

Um, so it is very, very hard. I'm not saying you can't have any single life at all. You're never going to like have a single movie night out or do anything fun for 3 years. That's not realistic. You will have a little fun, but your life will be heavily absorbed into 70 hours a week probably, or maybe more, of CRNA school all the time. And that's why you really can't work, because if you imagine you're already working a full-time 70-hour-a-week job, now try and imagine Going and doing more jobs on top of that and the likelihood of you failing your program and potentially jeopardizing it. And then once you fail, you're done. There is no like go back and repeat this semester. It's not like nursing school where you might be able to come back next year. You're done usually. And if you're done at one school, the other schools won't touch you either because they're going to see that you've already—

Yeah.

They see you ruined. You squandered a very valuable opportunity that most students didn't even get. They got turned away before they even got the yes. And you squandered it by doing something you shouldn't have been doing. They usually won't give you another shot, and that means your future career is completely changed. You're not going to be a CRNA now. And unfortunately, I've seen that happen to a few people. I've tried to help mentor them and, and get them back into a program again, and it's almost impossible to get them that second shot.

Yeah, I mean, I imagine, because I mean, I'm sure when they're— as soon as they're asked that question, it's probably like, uh, uh, like guaranteed, like, yeah, no thank you, we're gonna give this opportunity to somebody else. That's a huge bummer, and I'm glad that you emphasized that because I think it is good for people to hear, like, to take that like very, very seriously if you're given That opportunity. Talk to us about it now. I mean, just what you're telling me, I'm assuming this was like well worth it to you. How's your lifestyle? Uh, do you, do you ever miss like the— I don't, I don't even wanna say like bedside nursing, cuz as a CRNA, I feel like you, you're still, I mean, at the bedside, but do you miss like the RN role? Uh, yeah, just kind of talk to us about like your life now and kind of how that looks like for you on a daily basis.

Yeah, I mean, my daily life, like you said, I'm still directly dealing with patients every day. I still I'm giving medications, I'm managing things, you know, so it's, it still feels very personal and fulfilling. It's, I don't think I would have enjoyed doing a clinical role where I'm sitting in an office and talking to people about like, did they take their hypertension medications and things like that? Yeah, that would be tough. That to me, I feel like would be draining. But for me to be able to come in and say like, I'm going to do this, we're going to manage your care and make sure that you get a safe anesthetic and a safe surgery. And then I see you at the end of the day and I see you're happy, everything's good, your shoulder is repaired, and now you're on the healing process. And now you're going to be able to throw that baseball again the way you want to, which was what I did today. Today was shoulder surgeries all day for sports injuries. So I love that. Do I miss like the actual work of an ICU nurse? No.

Yeah.

That type of work can be very difficult. In my 20s, I could handle it and I could run with it and I could do the pulling and pushing and jumping and juggling fiery swords all day long and dealing with a thousand different crazy things. Uh, that to me, I don't know that I can handle it now in my 30s anymore. And I know there's nurses in their 60s doing it, so I don't understand how that happens.

Kudos to them. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.

It's something I, I don't know how they would do, but, um, so no, I don't miss the work, but I do miss the camaraderie and the kind of like team approach. Nurses definitely, when you become a CRNA, we're still nurses and, and I, we still like to say like, hey, we're nurses. Like, we're in the crowd too, but realistically we're not treated like nurses. And we're only like token nurses when people want us to be like the token nurse in the club. But really, yeah, we're kind of like, we're thrown in with the physicians for the most part with billing, with, you know, the lounges, with salaries, all those things. We're kind of thrown into that group. And so you don't really get that camaraderie a lot of times with, with other nurses. And sometimes you will with circulators. Today my circulator was She was really talkative. And I had— I even sat and had lunch with her today. So that was kind of fun.

Wow.

But in general, I don't get to do that. I don't get that kind of camaraderie. We don't get to build that rapport. And we do mostly work as an island. Like, I worked completely managing all of my stuff from start to finish by myself all day. And so whereas as a nurse, you're like, hey, can you come help me change this patient? Or hey, can you, can you spike this bag for me? Or hey, my patient's not doing well, can you Right. Like, what do you think about this? And what are your thoughts on this? And all that kind of stuff. You don't really do that in anesthesia as much. It's much more of like a solo job. This is my case, it's my patient. And, um, and you might see a colleague in passing maybe, and you might say hello or something, but it's not nearly the kind of—

Not like— yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much for giving me— this was like very insightful. I, I mean, I learned a ton. And I think anybody who's wanting to go to CRNA school or interested in that route, this is a great resource for them to kind of refer back to. So kind of, I know you kind of told us this, but tell us again, how do people find you? Where are you on socials? How do people sign up for your services if they're wanting the— do you only do mock interviews or do you offer other services? Like how do, how do people find you?

Uh, pretty much it's just mock interviews at this point, cuz my time is so limited and I don't, I, if I, if I try and do a bunch of other services, I feel like I would spread myself too thin and not too as high quality as I want to do. So it's just mock interviews for now, and it's— you can find the link on my bio in Instagram. It's Bolt CRNA over there, and my link in the bio will take you right to my Calendly link so that you can schedule with me if you need to.

Love it. Yeah, and if you guys want to see any kind of CRNA content, I recommend going and visiting, uh, Jason's page. There's some, some great stuff on there. So thank you for joining us today. I really, really appreciate you.

Um, thank you.

From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to thank you for being here at Club Nurse. I hope you gained something valuable from today's episode, and if you did, remember to share this episode with someone that you love. Follow me on socials at Nurse Daddies or Colton Lord 17, and be sure to follow nurse.org to stay informed with all of the hottest healthcare topics. Until next time, take care of yourself the way you take care of everyone else.

Love ya.

Bye.