Nursing school does get harder, right?

[Scrubz]

My nursing fundamentals class wasn't really a cake class or anything, but for the most part it was pretty easy. Aside from the first theory test I didn't really study that much for class. The lab part of class was stressful at times because we were learning skills all the time, but I think a lot of the stress came from the unknown rather than what was really going on.

I know that's a vauge paragraph but does that look familiar to anyone? Please tell me that this gets tougher because I really want it to. The tougher it is the more I learn and the better I do so I can't stand these easier classes. I know it has to get tougher but when? Next semester I take OB and Peds, plus a non-nursing microbiology class. I know I'll be putting way more time into nursing, but I'm not afraid of that, I just want it to be more involving. There's too many of my classmates thinking we've already done so much "nursing" stuff but I know we've barely scratched the surface (some fundamental skills, the nursing process, the other crap in theory that you'll never use again).

Oh, and I'm in an ADN program and I have three semesters left: OB/Peds, Med-Surg I, Med-Surg II (general class names but we'll study different areas within each "Med-Surg" class). Then after this I plan to get my BSN at another school. Can anyone help me out on figuring out what I should expect from here on out? Becuase I seriously expect it to be more challenging but my fundamentals class didn't really offer it. It does get tougher from here on out though, right? What can I expect based on your all's experiences?

[rags]

Don't count out the things you learn in fundamentals just yet, especially the theory portion. Trust me you will see it again on the NCLEX. When you begin your nursing career you won't actually sit and think 'about' maslow (for example) but you should be thinking 'like' maslow. It is necessary to properly prioritize your care.

Everyone will find different classes in nursing school to be easier than others. Everyone seems to have their strong points. I found the classes to not necessarily be constructed and designed to 'hard' but rather to make you think (if it seems to easy, find a way to absorb the information deeper because it is all important).

I personally found Psyc, OB, and PED's to be easy. I understood theory better than some others in my class but they were stronger in Pharm, Disease processes and patho. We tended to lean on each other to help us through what we needed a little extra with.

Nursing school isn't 'hard' it is time consuming. Each semester your Clinical get more involved and things begin to pile on top of each other for dead lines. It also depends a great deal on the instructor you have and their teaching style. We had an instructor that required presentations by power point every other week explaining a case study we were handed. Others with a different instructor were not. They simply did text and tests.

Good luck to you and take non of lightly. You will get out of nursing school what you choose to.

BTW ~ The NCLEX is nothing like nursing school or the question styles you see there. You need to be able to apply everything you learn in order to answer correctly on it. There is NO cut and dry right answer. Keep that in mind as you slide through the 'easy' stuff.

rags

[Lucyinthesky]

I ended up with an A in my Fundamentals class (the only one in the class) but worked my butt off for it. None of the material was so difficult to understand it was just the overwhelming volume that is thrown at you that is hard to juggle, especially with three children. I had an extremely difficult instructor who always expected more out of you than was actually required by the school. We are required to pass meds once during our first semester and most teachers would let you have some kind of notecards. Our teacher required us to pass meds at every clinical, with no notes, no pharm class, and drilled us with questions at the PYXIS before we could pass. The RN on duty later told us she could never answer those questions and she's been an RN for 13 years. One student even flunked meds for the day because she said aspirin was being used as a blood thinner (our teacher doesn't allow laymen's terms like that) instead of calling it a platelet aggragation inhibitor.

[rags]

"One student even flunked meds for the day because she said aspirin was being used as a blood thinner (our teacher doesn't allow laymen's terms like that) instead of calling it a platelet aggragation inhibitor.:uhoh3:"

OOH! I can see the benefit in learning your meds, but she sounds like a toughy.

[Clarise]

2nd semester coming up here and here it goes. I do well on tests and find more of the hands on fake demos harder than real patient care...I got the label of the "smart guy" just because I got A's this semester and the one test I did bad on 42/50 was because someone from another class said oh we did that test, here's what you need to know (WRONG!).

I've got 8 weeks of Med/surg 1 and then Peds...which I think also tosses in the OB clinicals. But apparently only 5/8 weeks are at hospital. We have some sort of off-site clinicals and then some other thing to do in place of 1 clinical(I think State legislature nursing day). I'm not too worried yet....more for Pharm 3rd semester and Micro during the 6 week summer session.

Clarise....OB/Peds was easy for me, as I have a lot of children and love OB. But most of my fellow students found it difficult, especially if they haven't had children or if they were male.

I usually don't play the "I'm offended" card...but what reason does being a male play on the OB/peds rotation? I too love kids, and figure that actually being a male may help (especially with boys). Was it a patient issue? Like female patients being uncomfortable with male nursing students..or what? I'd like to know.

My best friend in nursing school is male. We were both on the OB rotation together. He felt he was hazed by the nursing staff at the hospital due to his being a male. None of the patients would allow him in their room. He and the other male student spent their entire OB rotation in the newborn nursery doing Hep B shots, feeding and bathing. He also had no personal experience with L&D, dilation, contractions, etc. - he said that this lack of personal experience hurt him during test taking time. The comment wasn't meant to offend, rather explain his experience and difficulty getting through the maternity rotation. Regarding Peds, he said he had difficulty with the developmental questions on the exam, as he had no personal experience with which to draw conclusions. Maybe your experience will be different.

[cardiacRN2006, ADN, RN]

For the people that are bored and find nursing classes to be extremely easy why not change your major to premed and go to medical school instead of an ASN program.

Because I didn't and don't ever want to be a doctor. Just because studying and tests come easy for me doesn't mean I should be in a different field.

[locolorenzo22, BSN, RN]

Clarise, thank you for your honest and forthcoming post. I realize that my OB clinical will probably go the same way, but sometimes other female students haze me over being a guy...I just haze them back over some of the female issues...like me not having any stretch marks, cravings for chocolate, or hormone issues....all in good fun.

I'm preparing to spend most of the clinical feeding and bathing the little folks...and you know what? They usually don't complain unless they're hungry, tired, or pooping....oh, wait. That sounds like every other patient...

[moongirl]

Clarise....OB/Peds was easy for me, as I have a lot of children and love OB. But most of my fellow students found it difficult, especially if they haven't had children or if they were male.

I usually don't play the "I'm offended" card...but what reason does being a male play on the OB/peds rotation? I too love kids, and figure that actually being a male may help (especially with boys). Was it a patient issue? Like female patients being uncomfortable with male nursing students..or what? I'd like to know.

I have 5 boys in my class, and all but one of them did extremely well in OB- and thats just because of his crap attitude. There was only one instance that I saw that a male student was not allowed in a room and that was the husband of the pt throwing the fit, not the pt herself.

[cooljewels]

A wise man once said "be careful what you wish for". I thought the same exact thing when I was in my first semester, taking into consideration that I was a technician at an area hospital before I even entered nursing school and was already familiar with most of the "fundamentals". We learned bed baths, vital signs, oral medications, how to use a stethoscope...some days in class I would say to myself "Wow, I bet I could come to this class drunk and still get an A." Well I ended up getting an "A", and the other 111 students in my class were all doing well too, nursing school just didn't seem as hard as everybody said it was going to be.

Second semester was the "Wake-up call semester". At my school, second semester consists of beginning Med-Surg nursing. We learned electrolyte balance, orthopedics, common eye and ear problems, nothing too major, but there was a lot of reading involved and a lot of information to remember (such as lab values). I think of it as the wake up call semester because those people who weren't serious about the program and thought that they were going to blow by Nursing 2 without studying or reading as they did in Nursing 1, ultimately ended up failing out. After the end of Nursing 2 there were 63 students remaining out of our original group of 112.

There is no word for me to describe this semester that just passed, which was my third semester (Nursing 3), and consisted of advanced Med-Surg. We were learning 2-3 new disease states every week. Our readings were never less than 100 pages. There was so much information involved that memorizing every little detail proved impossible. Reading straight out of the class syllabus we learned Loss, Physical Assessment, Acid-Base balance, Diabetes Mellitus, Chest surgery, oxygen deprivation, acute respiratory problems, chronic respiratory problems, immunizations, cardiac failure, cardiac medications, myocardial infarction and coronary artery disease, cardiac surgery, peripher vascular disease, degenerative neurological, cerebral vascular accident, hypertension, cancer, chemotherapy and radiation, urinary system and renal failure, acute renal failure, chronic renal failure, organ transplants and ethical issues, dialysis and transplant, patient care management, biliary obstructive disease, liver disease, hepatitis, gynecologic disorders and hormonal imbalance, breast disorders, cystic fibrosis, loss of metabolic control (thyroid), intestinal obstruction, congenital anomalies, anemias and leukemias, peptic ulcer disease, adrenal hormones, tuberculosis, and last but not least end of life care. Needless to say I work on the weekends (2 twelve hour shifts), and I studied my butt off. I worked really hard this semester and only barely got a "B" in this class, and I'm normally an "A" student. There were no "A's" at all and our numbers fell from 63 students at the start of the semester to a mere 44 students after the final. I graduate in May (Thank the good lord up above) and I was fortunate enough to be a part of the mere 1/3 of students that made it to the final semester.

You may feel right now as though this is a waste of your time but the most critical part of your student experience is yet to come - Preparing for the boards. Keep a clear head, cut back on hours at work if you have to, and be sure to have a cup of coffee always at hand.

Good Luck and best wishes.

Julia

[cooljewels]

I just passed my second year Med/Surg. I thought it was ridiculously hard! Not sure if it was the class though or the instructor and her wording on the test! I'm onto my Peds/OB and Community and I am done! :monkeydance:

Me too! Amen to that!

[MommyJoy]

School has been pretty easy for me to. Sometimes I wonder if I am learning enough to really do a good job and pass the boards despite the fact that I am an honor student. I started a job on Thursday in a Cardio-Pulmonary special care unit, one step up from ICU. I learned more my first two days there, than I learned my entire junior year.

[Scrubz]

A wise man once said "be careful what you wish for". I thought the same exact thing when I was in my first semester, taking into consideration that I was a technician at an area hospital before I even entered nursing school and was already familiar with most of the "fundamentals". We learned bed baths, vital signs, oral medications, how to use a stethoscope...some days in class I would say to myself "Wow, I bet I could come to this class drunk and still get an A." Well I ended up getting an "A", and the other 111 students in my class were all doing well too, nursing school just didn't seem as hard as everybody said it was going to be.

Second semester was the "Wake-up call semester". At my school, second semester consists of beginning Med-Surg nursing. We learned electrolyte balance, orthopedics, common eye and ear problems, nothing too major, but there was a lot of reading involved and a lot of information to remember (such as lab values). I think of it as the wake up call semester because those people who weren't serious about the program and thought that they were going to blow by Nursing 2 without studying or reading as they did in Nursing 1, ultimately ended up failing out. After the end of Nursing 2 there were 63 students remaining out of our original group of 112.

There is no word for me to describe this semester that just passed, which was my third semester (Nursing 3), and consisted of advanced Med-Surg. We were learning 2-3 new disease states every week. Our readings were never less than 100 pages. There was so much information involved that memorizing every little detail proved impossible. Reading straight out of the class syllabus we learned Loss, Physical Assessment, Acid-Base balance, Diabetes Mellitus, Chest surgery, oxygen deprivation, acute respiratory problems, chronic respiratory problems, immunizations, cardiac failure, cardiac medications, myocardial infarction and coronary artery disease, cardiac surgery, peripher vascular disease, degenerative neurological, cerebral vascular accident, hypertension, cancer, chemotherapy and radiation, urinary system and renal failure, acute renal failure, chronic renal failure, organ transplants and ethical issues, dialysis and transplant, patient care management, biliary obstructive disease, liver disease, hepatitis, gynecologic disorders and hormonal imbalance, breast disorders, cystic fibrosis, loss of metabolic control (thyroid), intestinal obstruction, congenital anomalies, anemias and leukemias, peptic ulcer disease, adrenal hormones, tuberculosis, and last but not least end of life care. Needless to say I work on the weekends (2 twelve hour shifts), and I studied my butt off. I worked really hard this semester and only barely got a "B" in this class, and I'm normally an "A" student. There were no "A's" at all and our numbers fell from 63 students at the start of the semester to a mere 44 students after the final. I graduate in May (Thank the good lord up above) and I was fortunate enough to be a part of the mere 1/3 of students that made it to the final semester.

You may feel right now as though this is a waste of your time but the most critical part of your student experience is yet to come - Preparing for the boards. Keep a clear head, cut back on hours at work if you have to, and be sure to have a cup of coffee always at hand.

Good Luck and best wishes.

Julia

I just hope it's tough because the tougher the class the harder I try and usually the better I do. I don't mind putting the hours in as far as studying goes either.

As far as work goes I think I'm going to cut it down to one 12 hour shift a week because it's either one 12 hour shift or two, and with a full week of classes and studying, I don't want to spend my weekend at a hospital. You gotta have some free time or you'll burn out. Too much free time is a bad thing though, but I think it'll even out next semester.

[marilynmom, LPN, NP]

I learned more my first two days there, than I learned my entire junior year.

Me too! I just started as a nurse tech about 2 weeks ago (I float all over the hospital, I have worked on every unit now) and I felt like I learned more in one 8 hour shift than I did in clinicals my whole first semester!!