Any Positive Nursing School Experiences

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Can anyone share any positive experiences they are having at nursing school? These threads really point out the negative. I know it is going to be hard work, but is it really as awful as everyone here says? I have a very supportive husband and my kids will be in school or daycare during the day.

How many hours on average do you spend studying daily during nursing school? Not including preparing for a test. Is is around five hours a day? I will not be working. I have great grades on all my nursing prerequisites. Thanks for your insight!

Sure

Nursing school is hard but it hasn't killed me if that's what you are asking. I still manage to keep a social life, spend time with my kids, visit family, etc. I finish in 7 weeks and at this point I have a pretty good routine down. It's GETTING that routine that is hard.

I have a love/hate relationship with school at this point but overall I have had a blast in NS. As for studying it really all depends on what I have coming up. There are days when I dont study at ALL and other days where I can study up to 8 hours if I need to. I am an A/B student with more A's than B's but still...a good student. On "average" I would say I study 2 hours a day.

School is all about time management like I said. I also work PT and still manage to do all the things I talked about above. School CAN easily consume you but I never let that happen.

Good luck!

Can anyone share any positive experiences they are having at nursing school? These threads really point out the negative. I know it is going to be hard work, but is it really as awful as everyone here says? I have a very supportive husband and my kids will be in school or daycare during the day.

How many hours on average do you spend studying daily during nursing school? Not including preparing for a test. Is is around five hours a day? I will not be working. I have great grades on all my nursing prerequisites. Thanks for your insight!

Let me be the first to say that I love nursing school! The main reason is that I learn something new everyday, I love the profession, and I find my curriculum to be challeging and rewarding. To answer your questions:

no, nursing school is not awful, but it requires an immense amount of time, energy, perserverance, a positive "can do" attitude, and introspection. I believe some people have trouble do to a lack of one or more of these abilities.

studying- I must admit that I do not spend as much time studying as some of the other students because I study for "quality" not "quantity." What I mean is that I know what works for me, so I study smart. I do not study everyday, but I may study for a few hours only through the week and then spend all day on a Saturday studying for a test the next Friday. It just depends on how comfortable I am with the material.

grades- I had great grades on pre-reqs and I have great grades in nursing school. I am on the high-honors honor roll (3.8-4.0 GPA.) I think that one reason for this is that I study from NCLEX books (Saunders and Lippencott) for each test, usually before I go through the material from class lectures. It exposes my weak areas so I know what to focus on the most, plus prepares me for the type of questions to expect on the exams.

Good Luck in your program!

Specializes in Peds, PICU, Home health, Dialysis.

What do I love about nursing school? My classmates! You develop very close relationships with your classmates and it makes nursing school a blast.

Of course studying hard is a given, but it is not THAT bad. My first semester as the most difficult thus far because I wasn't sure how to study for nursing school. I really do not put that much time toward schooling anymore. I wish I did... but you get tired of studying every day. Thus now I study hardcore the weekend before exams and really only do work during the week if I have projects, online discussions, etc. And I assure you I am doing quite well. So it will really depend on the person.

I think that so much of it depends on the program, your personal experiences and interests, and what you have to do outside of school.

Personally, I am not a fan of nursing school. I don't like the constant group work, I don't like the emphasis on things that are really irrelevant to competent nursing practice. I also have kids and I study after they go to bed, which works well for my family life but does lead to chronic sleep deprivation for me. I am doing very well in my classes though and just scored a very high score on the HESI exam (an NCLEX predictor test) so apparently it is working for me. You'll have to just find the studying regimen that works for you. I promise I would fail if I did what some of my classmates do, but it works for them, and vice versa. You have to find your own balance.

That said, I've had some amazing experiences that have really made me certain that nursing school is worth it to become a nurse. It really is a great feeling to go home and KNOW that you helped somebody that day. It's rewarding when you take a test that you would have failed six months ago, and realize how much you really have learned. And it's very hard to complain about helping a baby be born.

Can anyone share any positive experiences they are having at nursing school? These threads really point out the negative. I know it is going to be hard work, but is it really as awful as everyone here says? I have a very supportive husband and my kids will be in school or daycare during the day.

How many hours on average do you spend studying daily during nursing school? Not including preparing for a test. Is is around five hours a day? I will not be working. I have great grades on all my nursing prerequisites. Thanks for your insight!

I ABSOLUTELY LOVE LOVE LOVE nursing school. I love my classmates and have built a great relationship with them. I don't have a relationship with my instructors and I don't want one. They are there to push me harder than I might push myself. They are there to break me down and teach me to build myself back up. They are a pain in the neck and I absolutely respect every negative thing they have to say. It makes me look deep inside myself and my thought process. They are going giving me a strong foundation to build on. Having said that, I study at home around 6 hours a day during the week and mostly nonstop on the weekends. My husband literally has to drag me away from my computer and notes and that's ok. I don't want to be a C nurse. I don't want to be a new nurse feeling so completely insecure that I am afraid of what I do and don't know. I want to be an A nurse. Others say your grades don't matter and the popular saying is "C = RN." I don't agree. I think it does matter. It shows the character of the person saying this. I think about the patients and their families and if I were them or if the nurse taking care of my family had just done enough to barely get by, I wouldn't want that. I certainly would not be proud of that. If a C is the absolute best I can do, that is great. If I am capable, and so far this is the case, to be an A or B nurse, then all the more better for my confidence in myself. You truly get out of nursing school what you put in it. My new friends, we have a bound others can never understand. We have a role that most will never know and who too few will respect. We are there because we want to help people. So, when I hear people complain about how long they have to study or the instructor hurt my feelings, it makes me sad. It makes me sad they don't take those experiences and build on them and embrace them.

Do your best, put your heart on your sleeve, be willing to be broken and rebuilt, and most importantly be true to yourself.

I like nursing school very much. Our professors are almost all very nice and encouraging. I don't find the work as hard as I found the prereqs (anatomy, microbiology, and chemistry). I find the topics interesting, and the clinicals are somewhat fun. Sometimes nervewracking, sometimes boring, but sometimes fun. I do hate being tested on skills! That's so stressful. If you aren't working and you're an A student, I definitely wouldn't stress about it.

I don't really know how much I study, not as much as I did for prereqs, I think. Several hours a day, but not like five or six, even right before a test. Well, sometimes when I have something due it will take me hours, like a paper or project. I do hate those.

You'll do great!

Kelly

I love Nursing school. It is the one of the most challenging experiences I've ever had. I attend a very good nursing school that expects a lot out of us, but the instructors work really hard and give a lot. They do not intimidate us INTENTIONALLY but build up. At the same time, they don't GIVE you anything, you earn it. All of our tests are NCLEX style so you never know exactly what to expect but you must have an understanding of the material. Our school is on a four day week, so i do all of my outside asssignments, clinical work, skills practice during the week, and study on weekends. It demands a lot of my time, but I am successful thus far and enjoying and taking it one day at a time.It very much depends on the program you go into how your experience will be.

Specializes in LTC.

The amount of interesting information you acquire in such a short time is amazing. But expect to work for it. If you go into NS knowing that it will be time consuming, difficult, and very often humbling and you are willing to accept that, you will probably have a great time in school.

You can't possibly imagine how much more knowledge you will have at the end of every week. On the good days, it feels so good to know that you have learned so much. Then there are the bad days when you realize that you have 36 hours to share with hubby, kids, friends, sleep, and learning everything you possibly can about how and why the heart works and all the conditions associated with the heart and nursing interventions for each condition and client teaching plans and goals, not to mention signs and symptoms and trying not to get them confused with the wrong condition.

No matter what happens on good days or bad, in the end we will be nurses. But you have to stick through it to the end.

My advise for tests is to study a little bit every day so that by the time you need to buckle down for the test, everything will be very familiar to you.

Good luck in school (you'll need it). :lol2:

Thank you all so much for your candid responses. It is great to hear some positive feedback on your nursing school experiences. I know it will be hard work but I am up for the challenge. I have a positive outlook and think as long as I have a goal in mind I should be fine. It has worked for me so far with my prerequisites. I am sure a lot of it will come down to getting a great study schedule in place. I look forward to this time in my life.

It sounds like you have a positive attitude and I think that is half the battle. I really love nursing school. I have wonderful instructors, i have met amazing and supportive classmates and it has been good so far. It is ALOT of work, but I have still been able to clean my house, go to a movie with my hubby and spend time with the kids, and manage to get decent grades (I have to work harder for those now than I used to).

I just started nursing school 4 weeks ago and love it! But I think your experiences will depend on your program and your attitude. From the very beginning the teachers in my program told us that its no longer about the 4.0 and competing against each other - instead, we have to learn how to work together and help each other out .. because you are not going to be working by yourself when you're a nurse.

I think the people who get upset with nursing school are those who are obsessed with the 4.0, those who refuse to change, or those who are in a program that just wants to churn out technically competent nurses.

"We can teach a monkey how to take a blood pressure."

"Trust with a capital T." Trust them. Trust that everything they do is for a reason.

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