Warm Smile and Calm Spirit Helps Former Legal Secretary Make Transition to Nursing Field
Corrected: Laid off for a year from her former job as a legal secretary, Janet Studenski wasn’t going to take a chance of missing the news if she was hired for the overnight hospice job she’d been seeking.
So she even carried her cellphone into the bathroom, reports the Charlotte Observer.
In addition to the training she had to get to qualify to interview for a health care position as a nurse’s aide, her personality was a plus, the newspaper reports. But the call finally came, over a year after she was let go from her $50,000-a-year job at a large Virginia law firm because of a lack of work.
She got the job, which pays a little more than one-third of what she used to make, because of her warm smile and calm spirit, nurse Pam Payne told the Observer.
Studenski, however, is one of the lucky ones: She has her husband’s income to rely on as well as her own. And, while she was a bit lukewarm about her work at the law firm, she has now found a new calling.
“I know this sounds corny, but I feel like I was chosen to do a really special job,” she tells the newspaper. “To think that I’m the one that’s going to be with people at the end of their life—I’m going to be the one to try to comfort them—that’s an important job.”
Updated at 3:23 p.m. to correctly indicate that Studenski was a legal secretary.
