Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/58

 work, with its hard training and its liberal rewards at the end of the straight and very narrow path, decide where you wish to study. So far as actual training is concerned you will rereceive as up-to-date instruction in any large city near your home as in such great centers as New York or Chicago. Perhaps there is even more chance for individual work and supervision, but on the other hand the hospitals of New York and Chicago present a greater variety of experience, a broader field of work, because the wards and the clinics are much larger. Also, work in a New York or Chicago hospital is much harder, the discipline is more strict, and your ego is even more cruelly suppressed than in the less strenuous life of a smaller institution.

If you should decide to enter a training-school in your own city or the city nearest to your home, go first to your family physician and subject yourself to a thorough physical examination. Armed with a certificate of good health over his signature and a letter of recommendation from your pastor, or from the principal of the school from which you graduated, present yourself to the superintendent of the training-school for nurses. If it is a large institution you had best write for an appointment, as many superintendents have certain hours for interviewing applicants. Your fate is then in her hands. She is an absolute auto-