Working 20-30 hrs per week on www.nomadnurse.com : Online tools for traveling/contract nurses
Right now, it's just a landing page, but my goal is to have a place for travel/contract nurses to review where they've worked, a place to review recruiters/companies, a forum, job postings and tools to help decrease the reams of paperwork that travel nurses have to fill out for every 3 month contract and for every state license they apply for.
I do not envy your job. Whilst I can assume that there is a large element of satisfaction (and it doesn't seem to be as hellish as they make out in movies) it can't be easy. Its just more bad news and frustrated smelly people all the time. Never ending.
I tip my hat to you.
Thanks, though. It's a lot better here in Silicon Valley than it was in the ghetto in Chicago. It was pretty much a nightly occurrence to be wrestling a drug addict or drunk every night. Nights were measured by how many gun shots or stabbings we took care of. There's not nearly the culture of violence here, which makes work a lot easier.
It's still pretty high pressure and high stress. I could be a little weird, but working on my business is a lot less stressful for me. I hope it takes off.
So if your business does take off - you would cease to be an ER nurse? Just interested...
I have a job, and if any business of mine took off, I am still happy to do what I do now (I guess that makes be one of the lucky ones).
The dream is to start making a little money with the site, and then be able to cut back a shift or two a week as I have more money coming in. We'll see how it goes. It's a lot of work to develop part time and work full time, even though I'm only working 3 days a week.
We expect to go live next week.
I'm scheduled to start a Ph.D. in another six weeks. I could delay. It's a tough choice. Getting my first toe in the entrepreneurial water has been exciting and fulfilling. I'm getting to do things "the way I always wanted to".
The PhD program will be there later. Trust me.
Delaying a year to do this site is definitely an option I'm considering. Cooking Indian food in my kitchen has got to be way cheaper than gnawing off my own leg. ;)
Keep in mind that very few people make it through a PhD program with a good enough outcome to become a professor, and it usually has less to do with intelligence, than with luck, social skills, and the ability to "play the game". And if you do manage to get a faculty position (somewhere...), you've got another six years of hard work ahead of you before you've got any true claim on autonomy. Then you get paid dirt for the rest of your life.
You can always go to grad school later, but you've only got so many years of youthful enthusiasm and the ability to live cheaply. And once you have a wife and kid(s), it gets a lot harder to start a company. My advice is to take the massive-upside risks when you're young, and leave the low-upside risks for later.
Of course, I wouldn't want to speculate about then, because who knows what could happen in 7 years... It's humbling to think that the Internet has only been around about double that.
Turkey outside of Istanbul is rather cheap, but not incredibly so. My nice 4-bedroom flat is 400 euros/month in a good student neighborhood (split with my 3 roomies of course). A very good student meal is around 4 euros, so we eat out a lot. The fruits/vegetables are ridiculously cheap in bazaars. People are really friendly and helpful, though it's hard to find people who are... different, for lack of better term. The uni libraries suck in Izmir, which is bad for me.
Staying with Erasmus students turned out to be best for me. Living with Turkish men has proven... difficult, and the culture doesn't really allow mixed-sex appartment sharing before marriage.
I never did it, but you can get 15 Euro/hour teaching English here, which is really good money for Izmir.
Everything else I've heard second-hand, so you might have more luck with Google. India is supposed to be dirt cheap (7 euros/night reasonable hotels). I'll go there alone and network my way into an appartment. My roomie went to Iran for two weeks, and it seems so interesting, culturally. If there wasn't the threat of a looming war, I'd stay some time there before moving more to the east.
Finally: moving/finding an appartment is very costly, both in time and money. Changing country is even moreso. If you're staying less than 4 months in a city, you're not really living there, you're just travelling. (nothing wrong with that of course, but my goal is to get work done and learn as much as I can)
Feel free to email. I wish I knew more people doing what I'm doing.
A few months ago after deciding to leave my present job, I finally made up my mind to go for it before having to find a new way of making money.
Having made the decision everything has just fallen into place since. I have discovered that making the decision in the first place was the hardest part and I think this probably holds true in many aspects of life.
Another thing you will find when you decide to do something like this is how much your peers support you. Apart from a few negative types everyone I know has been really encouraging and offered to help me where I needed it.
I wish you well with your plans, but start doing it instead of dreaming it! :)
Even if every person voted 6 times, it's still an average of 4:1 people who voted in the poll to those who upmodded the post.
In my weekends, I'm trying to marshall what resources I can to learn other things.
Right now, I'm playing with SproutCore, but have been deflected in setting up Django to serve as a back-end, and I'm finally learning some Python, and I'm really impressed with it.
I'll be getting my BS after a little over two years in school and as one of those “big picture” people, have become increasingly more focused on what I'm going to do once December rolls around.
That leaves me a striking question: How many other readers here are high schoolers like me?