IEN shares her successful NCLEX RN journey

[babymich_0922]

Feels surreal but I did it on first try! Before taking the NCLEX RN exam, of course I have doubts about how will I come out victorious but I didn't give up thinking that I can do it, that someday I can experience one of the greatest feelings on earth.

A little background of how I got my nursing degree and my life. I graduated 6 years ago in the Philippines and few months after my graduation, I took the local board and was successful! After a few years, my college bf and I got married and right after marriage I got pregnant and I gave birth on Christmas Eve and now he's 2 and a half years old :)

Now let's go to the important point, I did study for about 6 months and giving like 4-5 hours a day except weekends (these days are for my family). I am honest to myself that I can't do it with just little time to study, I graduated 6 years ago, been at home since I got married and didn't practice my profession since then. These are the materials I used, I would have to include my reviews because I think that money is very important and you would want to spend it to a worthy review material.

SAUNDERS 6th EDITION

I read this from cover to cover. I need to relearn my content. This book is excellent. I highly recommend this if you kind of forgot all what you learned from school or you graduated years ago without any current nursing practice.

LIPPINCOTT AND La CHARITY PDA

I didn't finish both of them, about 30% left. But I would say these are helpful materials. IMO both of them are harder than Kaplan and also the rationales are good enough.

HURST CONTENT VIDEOS and Q-trainer

I watched all of it but wasn't satisfied. Probably the reason is because I did this before Saunders and Hurst didn't talk about all of the diseases, just stressed some of the important things to know. It's a brief content review. This is great if you have a good grasp on content. I was scoring low 50% to low 60% on its qtrainer.

UWORLD QUESTION BANK

I couldn't agree more to a lot of its successful users. This q bank is superb in every way. I learned a lot from Uworld and I would definitely recommend this to every test taker. This helped me to reprogram my mind of how the way it should think when attacking NCLEX questions. It doesn't teach you tricks but purely applying your content and critical thinking skills. I used it a month before my exam and wrote the rationales. I finished the bank with 63% and after I answered my incorrect questions my overall went to 66%.

By the way, I did 3 of the kaplan q trainers. I didn't do more because I didn't want to messed up my brain. Kaplan has a different style and we didn't click. I know some of you would disagree with my reviews I made and that's totally fine with me. We have different strategies and we learn things differently. I did it because I invested everything I have (time and effort) and I pray every single day. I came to the test center feeling scared and nervous but I can feel that God is with me, He gave me the tranquility that I needed on that day. I prayed before I started and yes I got 75 questions! Felt like crying after that, the feeling was odd, you wanted to be happy because it's finally over but at the same time you worry and agony of waiting kicks in after the blue screen. Never felt this when I took my local boards. Anyway, God bless and good luck to all future test takers. I DID IT and there's no way you can't!

[LuluaspiringRN]

Proud of you girl :)