Cosmos of Kate

As I sit here trying to figure out how to start this post, I’m recalling how I felt about my life as a young teen just starting high school, and how I would feel at the end of it. I don’t know if all teens go through a phase of transformation that will end up defining much of their adult life, but as I ponder the changes I endured during that time, I can say without a doubt that those years shaped my future more than I could have ever known back then.

I recall at the time, my mom worrying about how I was changing, how I used to be a “social butterfly” and seemed to be retreating from that in certain ways, focusing too much on my boyfriend, spending too much time online and not enough time spent with my actual friends or with my family. Looking back on this time in my life, I see now that it was just the beginning of changing into the butterfly I was meant to become, even if it wasn’t the one others expected or hoped for.

Truthfully, I have a hard time even remembering who I really was before I met Ryan, I think mostly because I hadn’t yet defined myself when I met him. When I was a freshman he was a senior. My best friend Jenn and I had somehow infiltrated his friend group, mostly I think because Jenn was smitten with Ryan’s best friend. I spent much of my freshman year with that group of nerds, computer whizzes, gamers, soaking up all the information they were willing to share, becoming infatuated with everything tech related because the people I looked up to seemed to think it was “cool.”

Ryan and I started dating after he graduated and I was entering my sophomore year of high school. He was off to college that fall and we continued dating while he was in college, which in previous generations likely would not have made much sense for a number of reasons. However I am a millennial. I am of the generation that grew up in the era of video games, computers and the internet. I vividly remember getting internet access at home as a child and wondering what it would be like to simply chat with someone across the world whenever I wanted. Needless to say, staying connected with my boyfriend while he was off at college was not a challenge for a millennial entering the new millennium.

I spent a large portion of my high school era on the computer and online, chatting with friends at all hours of the day, playing video games, and generally just being “anti-social” in the eyes of previous generations. However, contrary to popular belief at the time, us young (or now I suppose “elder”) millennials were pioneering the era of online connectedness, which as we all know is now the sole way of communicating with our fellow humans.

Ryan and I dated for four years, I followed him to college, and even though our relationship ended, he massively helped shape the person I would become. Along with fueling my interest in video games, building computers, learning about coding, and generally just understanding how technology works, the single most transformative thing Ryan instilled in me was the desire and drive to answer my own questions. To this day, I always think of him whenever I Google something I need to understand instead of asking other people for the answers. The beauty of being a millennial was discovering I didn’t need to rely on others to answer questions for me, I had all the knowledge of the world at my fingertips, I just needed to type the questions into a search engine and voila! Answers. We could be self taught in anything we wanted to learn. Sadly… I feel like most people still haven’t gotten that memo.

As soon as I graduated nursing school in 2006, I quickly realized the massive importance of technology in the profession, both with life-sustaining machines, and with the up-and-coming electronic medical records (EMRs). With my already established love of technology and computers, I eagerly consumed all the knowledge I could about the EMR when it was implemented at my hospital. I quickly became the informal tech support person on my unit, as I had a thirst for knowledge of how it all worked, and I understood it, not to mention I was also a great teacher.

When I decided to go back to school for my bachelor and master’s degrees in nursing in 2013, I had to decide on a specialty. At that time, the field of nursing informatics was just coming into focus in the healthcare world and wasn’t yet a widely offered path for a master’s degree in nursing. Regardless of that, my manager at the time encouraged me to choose a school that did offer the path, knowing it was my true calling. Sadly, the school I chose did not offer that specialty and I instead chose nursing leadership and management for it’s broad scope of possibilities.

Just as I was finishing my master’s degree, I took a job in infection prevention. Getting away from bedside nursing had been a main reason for going back to school, and this new path seemed to fit what I was looking for at the time. It was nerdy, scientific, analytical… all the things I loved. Once again, I quickly became the tech support person for our team, not only understanding how everything worked within the programs we utilized, but also not being afraid to poke around and try new things. I loved pushing buttons to see what they did. I became our representative when the health system formed a taskforce for transitioning to a new data mining program. I helped design and build the program at a system level, taught my team how to use it, and was the support person for any questions or issues. This theme continued through my eight year career in infection prevention.

Toward the middle of 2024 there was a lot of turmoil at my health system, drastic changes were being made, leadership positions were being vacated, and our division was in the midst of a complete upheaval. I started looking for other jobs, feeling the need for a change in my professional scenery. I was applying for leadership jobs as I had a master’s degree in the field, but wasn’t getting any interviews because I didn’t technically have leadership experience. Getting increasingly frustrated and feeling utterly stuck in a situation I did not want to be in, I had a long, serious chat with myself about I wanted out of my career.

Something that had been plaguing my mind for some time, was the feeling that healthcare was in a slow, downward spiral in this country and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be sucked down with it. I toyed with the idea of completely changing career paths, but despised the idea of completely starting over, especially since I was soon to be turning 40. However, while assessing what I might want to do instead of nursing, I quickly realized the only things that sounded in the least bit interesting were things like data analytics, cyber security, computer science, etc. Suddenly the decision hit me like a ton of bricks. Nursing informatics.

Literally the best of both worlds for me, nursing informatics is the cross section of nursing, computer science and data analytics. After some quick researching, I realized all I needed to pursue, since I already had a master’s degree in nursing, was a post-master’s certificate in the field of nursing informatics, and it would only take me a year to complete. As I do with most big decisions in my life, I took 30 seconds deciding it was the right move and applied for the program.

One month into the program, I was eagerly searching for jobs in the field, hoping to get my foot in the door somewhere as quickly as possible. As luck would have it, shortly after my search began, the absolute perfect job popped up and I applied. Two interviews later, on Christmas Eve, I was offered the position and accepted it immediately. Nearly two months into my new job and three months into my school program, I can sincerely say that deciding to change career paths and going back to school for nursing informatics was one of the best decisions of my life. I feel like I fit in, school doesn’t even feel like school, it just feeds my thirst for the knowledge I was already seeking, and I know that what I am learning can translate very well into other sectors of the tech world if for some reason I ever do need to vacate the healthcare field entirely.

All of this to say, don’t wait to follow your dreams, and trust in the butterfly you WANT to become. It might look entirely different than the one others were expecting or hoping to see, but this is your life and only you know what your true colors are.