This Nurse Helps Other Nurses Land Their Dream Jobs! - Ep.86
Chelsea hails from Long Island, NY. Her path into nursing started at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Nursing as she forged her way through an intense 17-month accelerated BSN program.
After passing her boards in 2016, Chelsea began her nursing career in Los Angeles, CA. Countless life lessons were learned during her time in Los Angeles including experiences related to losing a job, starting and ending a business, and her wonderful journey into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Currently she works at a level 4 NYC NICU but resides in NJ as she became a new homeowner in 2020! Her other passion is helping nurses of all levels land their dream job through The ReNegade Resume, LLC established in 2019.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Naseema McElroy: [00:00:00] All right, Nurses on Fire. So we have a special treat. We have Chelsea Samms, a NICU nurse, and a co-founder of the Renegade resume. Hey Chelsea.
Chelsea Samms: [00:00:10] Hey, what's going on?
Naseema McElroy: [00:00:14] Oh, you know, I just wanted to dive into your story because I think that it's. A good story, especially for new grad nurses to hear, but also nurses who are pivoting or wants to pivot in their career.
So let's walk through your journey of becoming a nurse. Like what got you interested in nursing?
Chelsea Samms: [00:00:32] It goes all the way back to high school back in the day. I always wanted to be in the medical field. However, I. Didn't want to spend 15,000 years in school. Cause I want to take the quickest route to where the money resides.
I chopped me on being a physician off the block. So then it was between nursing or maybe being a PA. So I started to just utilize my network, like family, friends that were nurses and I chatted them up about nursing. And what I noticed about all the nurses that I spoke to was that they all love their job.
And that was something that kind of stuck with me throughout high school. And then when I got to college, I didn't necessarily go to a college that had a Nursing major. But I kinda like consider myself pre-nursing. So what I did in college was I spent some time continuing to either prepare for potentially going to nursing school after I graduated, but I I sought out nurses to shadow.
And so that further confirmed that that's, you know, nursing was what I wanted to pursue. So that's what I did. And I just did a, like a public health track at university of Maryland and was pre-nursing. And then I went to Johns Hopkins for an accelerated BSN program. And that's how I got into nursing. I just kind of always had a niche for the medical field. So.
Naseema McElroy: [00:01:57] So you did you're a nursing at Hopkins. How come you didn't want to stay there and
Chelsea Samms: [00:02:01] work? I wanted to come back, so I wanted to come back at so the tri-state area originally, really? So when I was applying for jobs, I think I applied to probably like 40 to 50 jobs.
Like on the East coast, New York, New Jersey, Philly. And then DC and Baltimore. So I did apply for jobs out there. But I wanted to be a labor and delivery nurse. Like you, I still do.
I wanna be like you when I grow up. So I was applying to a lot of maternity L and D and psych jobs.
Cause I really did like psych and don't ask me why I w I loved it. I was like obsessed. I was obsessed with the eating disorder patient population. I don't know why, but I found like a real affinity towards them, but that's, that's long gone now. So there was one job, like in nursing school, they were like, Oh, California nurses make the most in the country.
It's so competitive. You, if you're not number one of your class, you're not going to get a job out. Damn pop-up blah, blah. And I was like, I'm just looking at, just apply for one, just for the heck of it and sure enough, that's the job that I landed it was supposed to be labor and delivery.
So they cross trained all of their new grads initially. So they, you spent your first year in mother, BB, and then you would be cross training to labor and delivery. However, ran into some bumps in the road while I was there. And had to leave the F my first new grad job. And I ended up, I left before I got the chance to be cross-trained.
, they started to cross train me a little bit. So I started taking antepartum. I started taking high risk. Postpartums and like hemorrhages, like postpartum hemorrhages and stuff like that. And then I guess they had like a clinic attached to it. So I would go and do like NSTs and stuff like that and do recoveries over in labor and delivery, but not fully all the way cross trained.
And then I landed a job in the NICU, cause it was like either you going to work and take this NICU job or you move moving back to New York. And I was out in Los Angeles and I was like two teardrops away from moving back home with mom and dad. I know it was such a rough time for me, but you know, there's a blessing in everything.
Like I would have never guessed that I would have liked the NICU. And it just kind of fell in my lap and it was like do or die. I was like, I got to take this job and I'm going to have to like it. And I ended up loving it. So that's how I got to the NICU. I'd never wanted, I never considered NICU in nursing school.
Never thought I would like it, but I do. So I left LA after I left, I was out in Los Angeles for two years and I came back to New York, moved back on with mom and dad saved up money and I just moved to New Jersey.
Naseema McElroy: [00:04:43] All right. And you moved to New Jersey because you bought your own place.
Congratulations.
Chelsea Samms: [00:04:55] Thank you so much. Thank you.
Naseema McElroy: [00:04:59] That's that's a big move, but you deserve it. So now you're in the NICU and I know you love encouraging people to work in the NICU and especially new grads. So what's some advice you have for people coming out of school that want to land NICU jobs.
Chelsea Samms: [00:05:16] So you want to make sure this is like, I feel like everything is just flowing so nicely because you want to make sure your resume's popping. You're not going to get into the NICU if your resume is not together. Because it is a specialty and it is highly competitive and that goes for any other specialties, not just NICU.
So emergency room, other ICU, labor and delivery NICU, all those specialty areas. You want to make sure that you are standing out as an applicant? So that's number one. And along those lines, you want to make sure that the contents of your resume are actually like, not just visually appealing, but like you want things.
That's going to jump off the page. So leadership roles, volunteer work if you have the ability to do some shadowing on a NICU that great And, you know, doing things like joining professional organizations, like AWONN there's another one for you. A new nurses called NAN National Association of Neonatal Nurses, or NANN. I think they, they both have student memberships available. And then getting your certifications, like BLS, NRP things of that nature.
So you want to make sure that you're doing things that stand out as an applicant so that you can get called in for an interview and even better, if you can stalk the unit manager and get their email address, even better, do that, email them, let them know that you're interested and that you've already applied and maybe attach your resume again to that email. And yeah. And utilize your clinicals to the best of your advantage. So if you're a nursing school and you're gonna do going through either your OB rotation or your pediatric rotation, and you're in a hospital that has a NICU talked to your clinical instructor about spending a day in the NICU.
Like that is another easy ticket. Not easy to take it in, but it's a way for you to one, see if you're actually really gonna like the NICU and to maybe get the opportunity of meeting the nurse manager and actually getting her contact information authentically. So those are some quick little gems.
Naseema McElroy: [00:07:20] Those are awesome awesome gems, some awesome gems and yes, it does transition perfectly into the other business. You started outside of nursing. You have a company called the Renegade resume. Let me know how that came about and how you help nurses with their resumes.
Chelsea Samms: [00:07:38] So my partner, Ashley, Ashley, the NP on IgE She's like Insta famous and stuff like that.
I'm 35, I'm 35 milligrams of Chelsea on IG. We both went to Hopkins. She's also from New York. We both went to Hopkins and at Hopkins, we both were in the black student nurses association together. And then we went our separate ways. She stayed in Baltimore. She's actually still there. And I went, did the world toward Los Angeles to New York, to New Jersey.
I'm still running around. And, but we, you know, we remained in contact on Instagram and she actually started the business. And that, and I saw her post about it. And it was really, it was really funny that she posted it at the time that she did, because maybe like three weeks prior to when she posted that I was thinking about starting the same thing.
And I was like,sis. Let me in tag me in like tag me in. And she was like, yo, let's do it. So I came on board after she was only like a month into the business. I came on board after that and like the rest was history. But basically. When we were at Hopkins, we were fortunate enough to have kind of like a nursing career specialist on staff that served the students. Like her soul job was career preparation. Maybe not her sole job, but one of the biggest things that she did was to help us prepare our resumes, cover letters, and get ready for the job force. And she wasn't a nurse herself. And we were really blessed to have her and she was black, which was amazing.
I now realize, you know, when you get DMS on IG from nursing students and stuff like that, that that's not the case that every single nursing school actually, it's quite rare to have somebody that is there to like. A hundred percent. Like my job is to prepare you guys get your resumes together.
Your couple of days together, mock interviews, all of that, like that doesn't really exist in a lot of nursing schools. And a lot of nursing students are like, well, what do I do? Like what, what goes into nursing resume? I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I just, I'm gonna do Microsoft word template and just.
See how it goes. So she in DMS, I was getting DMS. And so we were like, this was a need and we didn't really see that much resources out there, you know, in the world itself or specifically nursing resumes. Our resumes are very different. You can't just have. Joe Schmoe come and look at your resume. They don't know the jargon. They don't know that your clinical sites from nursing school needs to be on there. You know what I mean? They don't know how to organize it, you know, it's just different. So we were like, well, why don't we do something by nurses for nurses? And that's, that's how we got into it.
Naseema McElroy: [00:10:24] So how has the business grown since you started it?
Chelsea Samms: [00:10:29] Yo, honestly, we. We've been like on the real, like, humble side, but we've like every, each year. So I think we started 2019 and it's now 2021 from 2019 to 2020. We doubled our profits each year. And then in 2021 alone. We've made the most in January, like one month that we ever had in like one month, like we've surpassed.
So we're already like super growing as a business. And you know, just the partnerships that we've built through Instagram now, Clubhouse, like Ashley's have the on IG. I'm not so much, I've been kind of, you know, have you on the clubhouse side and been building a lot of relationships on clubhouse, like last week.
I was, I had to take a moment to say like, you know what, God, I don't know what I did to deserve this. Because it was one day where it was like three people, either text me or email me and was like, yo let's collab. You'll let's collab. Yo let's did it. And I was like, yes, yes, yes, yes. I was like, I'm here for all of it.
Let's do it. Let's expand. Let's grow. And I'm just here to receive. So we've been really, really fortunate thus far. And you know, we're a little baby business, but I think 20, 21 is going to be our year. So.
Naseema McElroy: [00:11:59] Yeah, I definitely see it. And I, and you guys deliver a lot of value through your content.
So if you see their free content that they put out there, you can only imagine what they offer in their services. And so just want to do an overview for anybody who wants to work with you. Like what services do you offer? How do you work with nurses who are coming into nursing or want to transition.
Chelsea Samms: [00:12:23] Yeah. So we work with nurses of all levels. So all the way from the student, nurse, CNA, all the way up to DNP C RNA, we got you. Whether you're RN, LVN, LPN, whatever. We work, we can work with you. I've done resumes of all levels. Some people get confused because we have Renegade and the RN and is capital capitalize in it.
So they think we only do RNs and I'm like, nah, we do LPN home, health AIDS, all that jazz. We got you. So we. I'll start off with our most affordable options are our templates. So it's kind of like your do it yourself. Resume, cover letter. So we've created resume and cover letter templates where you download it, you purchase it, you download it.
And we have basically marked up all over a resume where you can just plug in, like, here's where you're going to type your name, your address, phone number. Here's where you're going to type the school. You went to city and state the year you graduated, here's where you're going to type the hospital. You last worked at city state, blah, blah, blah.
And we literally type it out for you. So you know exactly what information needs to go on your resume. What information needs to go on your cover letter? And like you just. So those are our most affordable options. We have a few different templates available for purchase depending on your level in nursing.
So we have student ones, nurse practitioner, ones, RN, with experience and everything in between. So those are our templates and then we do offer editing services. So if you already have a resume crafted and you're looking for somebody to edit it, we have a revamp and a restart option that revamp is when you bring us your resume and we will make a few edits for you.
And then the restart is more, we completely give you a new resume from scratch. Like. You got your resume from 1982, it's not going to work. We're going to create a new one for you from scratch and boom. You just fill out a form for us and we do the rest of the work. We have, we just brought back our refresh option, but we brought it back as for returning clients only.
So say you utilize our service before, but now you have another job under your belt and you want to add that job to your resume. And you're not exactly sure how, or you're just looking for extra set of eyes. We have that refresh option. We had taken it away for a while, but we just brought it back for returning clients only.
The cover letters. We have the revamp option for cover letters. And then we also do curriculum vitae days. Those are becoming more popular, especially in the nurse practitioner realm. We do personal statements for those that are looking to get back into school. So if you need editing services for that, we will not write a personal statement for you because it's a personal statement should be personal.
So you'd be surprised. Some people are like, can, so can you write our cover letter for it? Can you run me a cover letter? Like, can you write me a personal statement? And we're like, you can write it first and then you bring it to us and we'll get, we got you from there. Like. You'd be surprised, but there's also some people sometimes people have, especially the nurse residencies, they have some type of essay prompt with their application and we can help with those as well.
So those are, that's a general overview of the services. The only thing I didn't mention was we also host mock interviews. So there's a lot of times where people they're able to get their foot in the door. I remember this one client, she was like, I'm getting a ton of interviews, but I'm not getting any of the jobs.
And I was like, okay, book a mock interview. Like, let's see, what's really going on because you should be able to get one out of the eight job interviews you went on. It was her interviewing skills. That was the culprit. That was it. It was, it was not good. Just not good. So we offer those services as well.
And I think the only other new feature is we just added on LinkedIn, like revitalization. Type of option and that's it.
Naseema McElroy: [00:16:31] I need that one. That's the one I need. I can not stand LinkedIn. Oh my God. That's the, I put it up there and like when it, when LinkedIn first popped and then I said, I ain't touched that thing, so I'd probably need to redo mine. You got a client.
Chelsea Samms: [00:16:50] You know what, I'm guilty. I'm just guilty. I'm guilty of that as to I do not utilize LinkedIn as much as I probably should. Yeah,
Naseema McElroy: [00:16:58] I know that LinkedIn is a really good resource for a lot of people. I think we're spoiled as nurses, especially when you have experience. Cause you're just like what show you and the manager's number, ask her if she needs a nurse in it.
But there are a lot of nurses that, that do need to work on this guy and stuff like, yeah, I just. I see it and I love what you're doing and I love how you've grown your business. And you're doing this on the side of being a NICU nurse because, you know, like I said, I think there's so many opportunities in nursing.
And anyway, I love that you're doing this on the side. There's so many nurses that need this service, but I mean, I love that. First of all, Hopkins had this person that worked with you guys directly. We have like a career services for like the whole school and I went to UCSF, which is all like, but basically medical, but it wasn't specific like nursing and they weren't nurses that did it. So I love that they had this person. I can actually see you guys selling this service to institutions, to, to schools. So, you know,
Chelsea Samms: [00:18:05] Our plan is to, to expand out into nursing schools. Cause right now we're like heavy on the promo and just social media. So one of the opportunities that popped up last week where I was like, God, thank you.
I have somebody hit me up. She's a New York city clinical instructor. And she's doing virtual clinicals with her students. And she was like, I would love for you just to come present to her, them, just come talk to them. Like, cause they all want to get into specialties and they need to know like, what's, what's really good with like the resume and cover letter.
And I was like, say less. So I'm going to be doing my little presentation to these virtual clinical group. And hopefully, you know, if that goes well, I can start to forge a relationship with that university Yeah. So that's definitely on our agenda.
Naseema McElroy: [00:18:49] Exactly. I love it. I see it. It's going to happen this year. You guys are going to be popping and I love that you offer such individualized services. There are other resume people that do resumes out there, but it's more like. A template, like just simply like, Oh, this is your template, but you guys actually look are more hands-on and work with people all the way down to mock interviews, which I think is super duper important, especially for people who are entering the fields and nursing.
And like, it's not hard to get into the interview, but make the wrong impression. And that word gets around, you know, like nursing is small. So I love that. So, Share with the good people, how they can work with you guys, reach out to you guys. And I know you have something special for them.
Chelsea Samms: [00:19:34] Oh yes. So I, we are most like our main platform is Instagram, so it's at the Renegade resume on IG. If you go to our Instagram, our website is LinkedIn, our bio, or we might have like a link tree. But our website is theRenegaderesume.com. We have our phone number. We could text it's (917) 727-6728.
Naseema McElroy: [00:19:57] Nice. I love that. I love the text feature because you know, us, us younger folks need to be able to get in contact via text. I said, that's an excellent way to make sure your people have contact with you. I love it. I love it. All right. And so the Renegade resume theRenegaderesume.com is where people can find all of your services listed. And then I think you have something special for the nurses off buyer, audience
Chelsea Samms: [00:20:26] use code . You will receive 20% of any template resume or cover letter template. Or we also have a. Interview prep guide that qualifies as a template. And you can use that code for that as well. So N O F as in nurses on fire NOF20, if you use that code. Get some free off
That's what I'm talking
Naseema McElroy: [00:20:52] about thank you for giving this special offer to our audience. Thank you for sharing your story, Chelsea. And I'm so glad that you have started this much needed service because these nurses out here are, especially in these COVID streets are looking to transition or land their first job.
And now you don't have to go directly to med surge. If you are a new grad nurse, let's dispel that myth, but you do need to have a resume that is. Pop in. So I'll reach out to Chelsea and Ashley of Renegade resume and they will hook you up. All right. Boom. Thanks.
No problem.
Hey there I’m Naseema
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