Does it ever annoy you when people say nursing school is easy?

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I'm currently going for my BSN and I go to a school that has a lot of big health profession programs. Pharmacy, Physical Therapy, Physician Assistant ect. Anyway I know a lot of pharmacy students and it bugs me when they always think Nursing is easy. Now I know they are only saying it in terms of the admission process. For pharmacy they have to take pcats and interviews, recommendations and we don't need that for our nursing program. When I ask them about their backup major they are always like "Oh I'll just do nursing". Now compared to the other health professions, Nursing does have easy admission, because our school decides to accept about 200-250 nursing students and gradually weed them out in the professional phase with exit exams at the end of the semester or people dropping out when they find out what nursing school is REALLY like. Even aside from just the pharmacy majors I find a lot of people, including pre-nursing majors don't really know what you actually do in the nursing classes so when I tell them about clinicals, six hour labs, exit exams, ect they are always surprised.

I guess it's true that you can't really understand nursing school until you actually go through it. :bow:

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Specializes in Critical Care, Education.

LOL - and it will just get worse! Thank heavens we have venues such as this one - to connect with fellow members of our own Nursing "tribe". No one else really understands who we are or what we do. Sometimes, it still irritates me, but not so much. I get a lot of the "didn't you used to be a nurse?" which really ticks me off... I AM a nurse. Nursing practice encompasses a whole universe of practice settings, even education.

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I'm there with you!! While I do see the point that it seems "easier" to get into nursing school, why does it seem that people misconstrue this to think that nursing school itself is easy? There is a reason that class sizes start out so large and end up so small come graduation. It's not that easy and many people can't handle it once they get into the work. It takes a high level of determination and desire to succeed!:typing

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It totally annoys me when people say that. They cannot see the sacrifices we are making, or the stress we endure during nursing school. The worst thing I've heard was from an ex-boss, who didn't know I was pursuing admission into a nursing program. He claimed that "Nurses are stupid. They only do it (nursing) because they can't do anything else." The saddest thing is that he makes his money insuring nurses. I only hope that one day, when I have graduated and am licensed, that I get his sorry @#$% as a patient. What a surprise that will be! :devil:

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Sometimes I think we (nursing students) live an alternate universe. I know we are a different breed in comparison to the others, let's see we are going into a field with 12 hour shifts, lot's of overtime, decent pay, to care for people at their worst (sometimes their best like when baby's are born), to be responsible for catching everyone's errors from the doc's to the pharmacist's. The only time I get irritated is when my family does it, they see how hard I study and work at this, yet sometimes they have to do stupid things, like wanting me to go out to movie on the night b4 a final!! Excuse me, I wrote it on the calendar two months ago.

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Unless they've done it themselves, they can't say with any certainty it's easy, it's merely their unsubstantiated generalization based on simple observations.

Personally, i'm an A type hardcore student - all A's through my whole life...well, I get B's now - this nursing business is hard!

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Specializes in Pediatric Pulmonology and Allergy.

It doesn't bother me in the least. People are challenged by different things... I'm not in nursing just so other people can acknowledge what a hard training program I went through. If they don't get it, they don't. If it makes them happier to think they have it more difficult, be my guest.

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Specializes in Hospital Education Coordinator.

Get this - when I was in nursing school I attended the night program because I had a day job. There was ONE curriculum but it was presented during the day or at night. The day students thought we got less education and were not getting the full benefit of school. However, many of our instructors were full time healthcare providers, with advanced degrees, who could offer so much more than instructors who have not done nursing in years. It was interesting. Don't waste your time trying to convince people they are wrong. "Nothing is more true than what is believed" (sorry, do not know whom to credit fo quote).

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At my community college, nursing is the hardest program to gain admittance to. In my group, they took 10 of us for the RN program out of 600 applicants.

However, now that I'm in the program (halfway through last semester), I don't think it's that hard. I had jobs that were much more stressful than my school experience has been & because I'm not working full-time during school, I feel like I have more free time now to do things with my kids. It's actually been a nice break from the "work-world", but come May, it's back to the old grind!

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I feel you on that subject.

Many of the pre-med students

don't even think about nusing

until they fail bio 1 or chem..

then nursing is the "back up".

Most people look down upon

nursing and they feel like its so easy to do.

if it's so easy how come qualified

students don't get in or why

are there only 124 applicants accepted

out 650?

I laugh at these people. Nursing

is a broad and dynamic field, with

true patient care.

It only takes the bold and dedicated

to survive..:rolleyes:

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Everybody & everything annoy me because I'm in nursing school. Hell I annoy myself :yeah:

Seriously great posts & those pharm students who are cocky are more then welcome to walk a week or 2 in our shoes. They can see what it's like to have the family pressures on top of us, in addition to being mistreated at times by people of all disciplines & hell even our own instructors, preceptors, and nurses we shadow because they are so mistreated themselves they take it out on the nearest target. I'm not saying they don't have it rough lecture wise & test wise as well but they do not have to deal with all the human emotions that we are learning to deal with.

They have no idea what it's like to be in a room w/someone who is giving birth, dying, afraid, hemmoraghing, or just plain crazy when we ourselves have only been a student a few weeks or months & our nurse we are shadowing is down the hall w/a pt who is even worse off then the room we're in. After that we second guess everything we just did, worry if our nurse & instructors are mad at us, thinking "will they say I did good here or did I screw up & should be bracing for public humiliation?"

Then we are expected to shift gears & go home cook, clean, etc, and read 50 chapters by 5 am the next morning for some test on prioritizing human needs in an ideal world because it NEVER EVER goes the way answers say it should go in the real world. Meanwhile our heads are still spinning from what we witnessed or partcipated in during clincials but we have to hold that thought because we have to write careplans, or a 10 pg paper on BS, etc, etc. :banghead::banghead:

Anyways "a pox on them" let them all marry a nursing student :yeah::yeah::yeah:

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Specializes in Pediatric Pulmonology and Allergy.

Funny you should mention pre-med students, because I took some pre-reqs together with the pre-med students and I led the class. Med school wasn't the right choice for me for a whole host of reasons, but nursing wasn't the backup plan because I failed out of pre-med.

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