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

[guiltysins]

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.

[9livesRN, BSN, RN]

I am not sure if it is easy... although work full time and school full time is too much! but.. doable... less then 3 hours sleep per night!

if some say its easy, maybe they have extra time, or they have big brains lol

i am having a hard time putting my "pea sized" to work!

[Biol20fan]

OMG heck yes it annoys me! (I would use some other words, but I'll be a good girl)

IMO the thing that fuels that view is the fact that nursing seems to be the career du jour (like the computer field was a while back). I overheard one woman (well, more like girl...she was 19, but acted 13) say earlier this week when questioned about what she wanted to do when she went to college, "Oh, I think I'll go into nursing," in a very flippant manner. People seem to think that just because there is a lot of demand to get into nursing programs, that it's easy. And as we all know, that's so far from the truth.

All I gotta say to those people is, "Walk a mile in our Z-Coils. Then you'll know what I'm talking about."

[coolpeach]

I have never heard anyone say nursing is easy. I live in Dallas, Texas, and here the admission process is lengthy. It's very difficult to get into the programs. There are so many students who want in and only a limited number of spots so it allows the programs to be picky about who they allow into those spots. Even strangers who I tell I am in nursing school always say " Wow, you must be really smart to have gotten a spot in a program". Most people seem to know it's hard, but they don't really realize just how hard the actual program is.

[Oorah]

Most people have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, or are just complete and udder morons. Haven't you managed to figure that one out yet boys and girls. Sheeple just repeat what they hear from their brother's friend's uncle's sister's roommate. I personally think the amount of time preparation and workload that nursing students go through just to get an RN cert is darn near insane. Needed, a must, most resoundingly yes. We are dealing with people's lives on a daily basis. If we don't know our meds: people can die. If you slip up and chart things incompletely/incorrectly: people can die. We are trained hard, which is good. Practice like you play, I was always taught.