Emily Meade next to her research poster at the National Association for Pediatric Nurse Practitioners Annual Conference
Author: Emily Meade | Major: Nursing | Semester: Spring 2023
Hi! My name is Emily Meade and I am a senior nursing student at the Eleanor Mann School of Nursing. For my thesis project, I worked with Dr. Kilmer and our wonderful dog Gryffin to assess the effects of animal assisted therapy in children with autism spectrum disorder and developmental delay. After completing our research, we traveled to Orlando, Fl for the National Association for Pediatric Nurse Practitioners conference to discuss our findings. This involved standing in a gallery of posters to talk to conference attendees about our work and answer any questions they had. Although this was very daunting at first, everyone was very kind and appreciated all of the work that we had put into this project. I learned how to articulate what I had contributed to our research, and how to adequately explain our findings in a way that was short and sweet. This conference was an amazing experience, and getting to share our research and receive feedback from those more experienced than us in this field was so helpful. We got to see that there is a lot of interest in this generally unresearched field, and that a lot of nurse practitioners felt they could apply this knowledge to their practiced.
One small bump in our research was that due to our small sample size, our results were technically statistically insignificant, but it was encouraging to hear from many different practitioners that they agreed that statistically insignificant does not my insignificant all together. There is still a place for this type of research in the field, and the need for it was confirmed through our interactions with providers.
This trip contributed to my professional development by the exposure to a lot more information about nurse practitioners and the doors that could be opened for me. We were assured that our research this early in our careers would set us apart in our future endeavors and give us more opportunities than I thought it would. We met and connected not only with many practitioners in general, but with many schools with DNP, FNP, PhD, and CRNA programs that had an interest in us as prospects due to our undergraduate research. Meeting with various providers and schools provided me with a lot of information about how specialized the nursing field can get, which helped me to start thinking about what I might want to do later in my career.
If I had any advice to people wanting to present at a conference of this level, it would be to be confident in the work that you have put in and your knowledge of the subject, and to not be intimidated by the knowledge of those around you. As I walk into my career as a registered nurse at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, I will take what I learned at this conference and apply it to not only my care of the pediatric population as an BSN, RN, but will continue to explore what further education may look like for me.