I have been working as a nurse for some time now. Selecting this field of professional development always seem like a natural choice for the kind of personality I am and I have always enjoyed doing what I do but at the time when I started working as a nurse I could not even imagine that I would fancy going back to school and furthering my professional education would be something I would actively pursue. Namely, I was feeling eager to start practicing. However, as I started to care for patients, cooperating with other nurses, and communicating with nurses, I began to realize two things that have been pushing me to pursue further education in nursing.

Namely, caring for clients and watching them get better has fostered an even greater dedication and the desire to become better at it. Cooperating with colleagues highlighted that nursing is not just about knowing how to administer different treatments, but also about learning to professionally and masterfully coordinate work with fellow colleagues and establishing a positive therapeutic relationship with the patient. These two realizations, along with a strong ambition to advance in my career, have pushed me to seek further professional education and further development of my skills.

Although sometimes tough, working directly with patients has always been something that made nursing an attractive profession for me. Caring for people, helping them get better, assisting them with the development of new healthier habits to have a chance to live a better quality and longer life is what makes being a nurse so rewarding. Research suggests that such an inner vocation to care for other people makes up one of the key reasons why people choose nursing career1.

However, while this may seem as an innate call and natural ability, caring for people professionally and fostering the best possible outcomes to patients actually requires one to possess some deep professional knowledge as I have come to realize in my practice. Namely, learning to develop individual approaches to patients faster, communicating better, and recognizing all the important details and developments more efficiently are just a few examples of skills I regularly thought it would be good to have if I wanted to be a better and more effective nurse. While practice is important for developing them, classroom education may offer the scaffolding needed to develop these skills faster and better.

Another aspect of the nursing job that has pushed me to pursue further professional education is cooperation and communication with colleagues. While things change from one health institution to another, most it seems that most of the nurses are working in environments that emotionally intense and resource scarce. These conditions impose additional challenges for nurses in handling their work and require more efforts from everyone to make sure that all the operations run smoothly. This means effective cooperation with the team becomes crucial for ensuring the best quality care for the patients. At the same time, however, because of how intensive things sometimes get, miscommunications, misunderstandings, and even conflict become quite common, placing an additional toll on the quality of services provided by the institution. Hence, further developing my expertise in group processes, communication practices, decision-making strategies, and leadership appears to be essential for improving my performance and contributing to the improvement of the services we provide.

Lastly, my seeking further professional education in the field of nursing is also motivated by my ambition to advance professionally. As the field of nursing continues to expand while scientific and technological advances transform the way we treat and care for the customers, developing a greater theoretical expertise is crucial for preparing oneself to changes that are to come, developing the ability to adapt to them, and becoming capable of leading in the field of nursing.