Any advice on my upcoming semester, staring medsurg?

Plutonium261 · Aug 13, 2015

Med-Surg is a very interesting subject, and can be tough just as equally, because it covers such a wide array of all equally important material. This is not one of those topics that you can or should memorize things to be able to take an exam, and then forget most of the material shortly after. Everything you'll learn in med-surg will carry on, and build on, throughout nursing shcool, and throughout your nursing career. Everything in this builds on each other. And for me, although I did very well in intro to med-surg, intermediate med-surg (or med-surg II in some shcools) I did well in also, but I found it to be much tougher, much more in depth, and required much more critical thinking. For me, doing only flash cards did not help. Use flash cards but you need more than that. You cannot just memorize the material anymore, for a number of reasons, but one reason is because of the NCLEX style questioning that you will encounter on your exams. These questions are not straight forward, they are scenario based and often require you to critically think through the situation(s), or prioritize. Know your Maslow's! This will help out a ton with your prioritization questions where all of your answer options may be correct, but you need to select the most correct answer. Yeah you won't truly grasp the awesomeness of the latter part of that last sentence until you know what I'm talking about. Oh and the SATA questions! Awe man, is it a love/hate relationship! Hahaha. All of these are things that I heard over and over from instructors, and people ahead of me in the program, so many times that the phrase looses its..."Umph", for lack of a better word. Hahaha. NCLEX style questioning is something that you'll only truly understand (and grow your love/hate relationship with) once you start practicing and taking your exams. The key word in that last sentence is practicing. Practice, practice, practice NCLEX style questions. Buy (don't rent, buy) a book that contains NCLEX practice questions WITH the rationales, preferably (for me anyways) with the rationales for the correct & the wrong answers as well. Off the top of my head the Med-Surg Success book, Saunders NCLEX Comprehensive Review, and the HESI comp. review, are all good books I have that helped quite a bit in Intermediate Med-Surg. Look for some books like this and practice these specific exam style questions. Also, find some smart classmates and form study groups. P.S. Having a solid foundation of your pathophysiology (or knowing how, when, and where to look it up when needed) will help out tremendously. Sorry if any, or all, of this seems jumbled up. It's late and I just got finished with a long 13 hours at work, hahaha. I'm sure there is so much more that I can't think of at the moment, but there is a start. If I think of a few more things I'll post them, and if you have any questions feel free to let me know. Hope this helps a little.

roxiroxmysox · Aug 13, 2015

Just make sure you read your texts and understand what is going on. Draw it out on a white board so you can see it visually. Look at YouTube videos. Just work to understand all the components and you will do great

jb88 · Aug 13, 2015

I know that a lot of nursing students sometimes don't do the readings as throughly in certain classes but I would say medsurg is a class you should not skimp on reading! At least for me, our medsurg exams had questions on them I would not have known if I hadn't read the chapters. Also, I found that studying by "talking it out" with a friend or teaching someone else tge information gas helped me a lot.. hope this helps

Beautiful_Soul · Aug 13, 2015

Med-Surg is a very interesting subject, and can be tough just as equally, because it covers such a wide array of all equally important material. This is not one of those topics that you can or should memorize things to be able to take an exam, and then forget most of the material shortly after. Everything you'll learn in med-surg will carry on, and build on, throughout nursing shcool, and throughout your nursing career. Everything in this builds on each other. And for me, although I did very well in intro to med-surg, intermediate med-surg (or med-surg II in some shcools) I did well in also, but I found it to be much tougher, much more in depth, and required much more critical thinking. For me, doing only flash cards did not help. Use flash cards but you need more than that. You cannot just memorize the material anymore, for a number of reasons, but one reason is because of the NCLEX style questioning that you will encounter on your exams. These questions are not straight forward, they are scenario based and often require you to critically think through the situation(s), or prioritize. Know your Maslow's! This will help out a ton with your prioritization questions where all of your answer options may be correct, but you need to select the most correct answer. Yeah you won't truly grasp the awesomeness of the latter part of that last sentence until you know what I'm talking about. Oh and the SATA questions! Awe man, is it a love/hate relationship! Hahaha. All of these are things that I heard over and over from instructors, and people ahead of me in the program, so many times that the phrase looses its..."Umph", for lack of a better word. Hahaha. NCLEX style questioning is something that you'll only truly understand (and grow your love/hate relationship with) once you start practicing and taking your exams. The key word in that last sentence is practicing. Practice, practice, practice NCLEX style questions. Buy (don't rent, buy) a book that contains NCLEX practice questions WITH the rationales, preferably (for me anyways) with the rationales for the correct & the wrong answers as well. Off the top of my head the Med-Surg Success book, Saunders NCLEX Comprehensive Review, and the HESI comp. review, are all good books I have that helped quite a bit in Intermediate Med-Surg. Look for some books like this and practice these specific exam style questions. Also, find some smart classmates and form study groups. P.S. Having a solid foundation of your pathophysiology (or knowing how, when, and where to look it up when needed) will help out tremendously. Sorry if any, or all, of this seems jumbled up. It's late and I just got finished with a long 13 hours at work, hahaha. I'm sure there is so much more that I can't think of at the moment, but there is a start. If I think of a few more things I'll post them, and if you have any questions feel free to let me know. Hope this helps a little.

Thanks A ton! really helpful info, I looked up the Maslows and just want to know if it goes from top to bottom or bottom to top? Also, I haven't started patho yet, Idk when we will get into that, I'm in LPN school. I have the Saunders Comprehensive Review for the NCLEX-PN Examination book that we got on our first day of school last semester.

Plutonium261 · Aug 14, 2015

Oh ok, my apologies, some of those books were for the RN versions, however, I'm sure they have similar texts for PN's. As far as the Maslow's Hierarchy goes, this is something that is universally across the board in nursing, so you should be good there. This goes from the bottom to the top, with your most basic needs; air, food, water; being on the bottom and needing to be realized and satisfied first and foremost. Then moving up to each next level as the level before it is realized, with Self-Actualization, and Self-Transcendence, being the most difficult to achieve. My main point for Maslow's is to memorize (one of the things you should memorize) each level and what can or needs to be accomplished at each level. This will help you when you get prioritization questions (on an exam or in real life) where all the options given are correct, or all of the answers are something that you would definitely do, but you need to choose the "most correct" answer, or the option that you would do first. And when choosing an answer it is most usually a good idea to fall back onto Maslow's, along with all of your other information you've gathered and stored in your "tool box", and all of your clinical judgement you've attained while in school and at clinicals, and quickly bring all these together in your head and make the best decision possible for the best outcome for your patient.