I am a second year nursing student enrolled in a consortium. Our nursing program is somewhat unusual in that we take our first year courses at one school and our second year courses are at another school, which is 2-3 hours away, depending on where we live. I really enjoyed my first year of nursing school. Now? I hate it. HATE IT.
We have 3 new instructors at the new school. I feel like I'm spending my day with strangers. None of the instructors even know our names unless we are in their clinical group. We have about 40 students so its not like there are hundreds of us. They haven't shown any interest in getting to know us either. One of them is a complete OCD control freak and everything is her way or the highway. Another has only been out of nursing school for 3 years and he's already "teaching", if you can call it that. He spends 99% of his time goofing around and cracking jokes. You can forget about getting a straight answer out of him and with all his goofing, one can never be sure when he's serious and when he isn't. The third behaves as if she is in the early stages of dementia.
Before we went to this other school, we were told that our driving situation (remember, its 2-3 hours) would be taken into consideration. They must have considered it for about 30 seconds, if at all. They scheduled our clinicals in such a way that carpooling is difficult and often, impossible. I have a reasonably efficient car and a trip there and back runs me about $25 in gas and we go 4 times a week. I'm slightly employed but most of us aren't employed at all and there are a lot of single mothers in our class.
We drive these 4 to 6 hours a day to listen to the control freak READ every single word of the powerpoints to us. We don't have any kind of class discussions and even comments and questions seem to be discouraged. I am learning not a single thing from these "lectures". In fact, I feel as if I haven't learned a single thing from these bobble heads the entire time we've been at this school. We can sit at home and read the PowerPoints and save $100 a week in gas money!
And then there are clinicals. I can't speak to the other clinical groups because I'm not in them, but ours is useless. Do you see a trend here? We are on a floor that consists of hospice patients and old people with lung issues. That's it. No variety, nothing. The nurses on the floor are assigned anywhere from 7-10 patients every single day so they certainly don't have time to teach us anything or hardly even let us watch anything. I was assigned to a nurse ONCE. She just graduated from nursing school, she said she hated being a nurse, and was completely frazzled with the patient load. We went to give IV meds and she mentioned checking for compatibility but because the computers were down, she didn't bother to consult a paper drug guide and gave the meds without checking. Excellent learning right there.
So, in a nut shell, we drive 4-6 hours a day to stand around in the hospital hall and wait for something to happen, or for the day to end. I asked my clinical instructor to listen to my patient's lungs to help me understand what I was hearing. His response? "No, it doesn't matter what I hear. Everyone is going to hear different things." Really? Thanks, that was helpful. We get the same d**n speech from him EVERY SINGLE MORNING about how "we'll pitch in and help the CNA's because that's what we're there for". Now, I don't mind helping, I'm a CNA myself, but that is NOT what I am there for. I am there to learn to be a registered nurse. I don't appreciate all this traveling and getting up at 3 am to do CNA stuff. Bed baths? That's all we did the first 2 weeks we were there. I have managed to avoid that since but a lot of my classmates are doing CNA skills and nothing else.
I am just sick of it. Its a waste of time, money, gas, and its all completely useless. I enjoyed nursing school at the beginning but now I'm just marking time waiting for it to end.
