Is nursing school REALLY that hard?

What Members Are Saying (AI-Generated Summary)

Members are discussing the difficulty of nursing school, with some expressing that it is exhausting due to the workload, constant busywork, and testing. Some members find it challenging due to the amount of studying and prioritization required, while others believe it is not as hard as perceived. The discussion also touches on entrance exams, grammar improvement, and the importance of loving the field of nursing to succeed.

I just started the 2 year ADN program at my community college about a week ago. I am actually the youngest in my program at 18, and I have no nursing experience. Before I started, I obsessed over blogs and spent a lot of nights wondering if I could even make it through nursing school. I graduated high school in the top 5% of my class with a good ACT score, and I'm generally a hard worker. I am just wondering, was nursing school as hard as you thought it would be and if so, why?

I started an ADN program at 18. Graduated at 20. Now 21 with a year experience. I plan on going for my masters within a few years. It's hard! It will push you to your limit and not prepare you at all for the real world. BUT, you can do it! You have to have a passion and take school seriously. I was one of the few "babies" to make it, because I didn't go party and ignore the seriousness of the program. I will say, it's so worth it! I get to do my dream job at such a young age. So my advice: take it serious, be confident in your abilities, and never give up! Good luck!

Specializes in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology.
courtneymann said:
Thanks for your replies! Luckily, I don't have to work, and I live at home with my parents. Maybe that will make it easier for me. What I'm hearing is, it is hard, but the difficulty truly depends on each individual and how you learn. Thank you again for the replies! Hopefully I can stop stressing for at least a couple weeks. :sarcastic:

Just make sure you figure out how to study for nursing school curriculum before it's too late. You might be great at "traditional" school but nursing school is a totally different beast. Expect what worked for you in high school and pre-reqs to not work anymore. What you end up learning works may end up not working for the next class. What works in the next class might be what you did in high school. You must be flexible in how you study (read: don't resist it and be stubborn and try to make it work if it's not working for you).

Studying for nursing school is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It must be carefully tailored to each class and to each instructor's expectations.

Specializes in School Nurse.

I completed an accelerated MSN program 20 months in length. I already had a BS in biology and a PH.D. in molecular genetics. My child was not quite 2 years old and I was almost 40 years old when I started the program. IT WAS THE HARDEST THING I HAVE EVER DONE. But I graduated with perfect 4.0 😊

There is a reason they say a Bsn degree is the hardest bachelors degree to obtain... So yes! Almost finished with my first semester.

Specializes in NICU, Trauma, Oncology.
alyshih14 said:
There is a reason they say a BSN degree is the hardest bachelors degree to obtain... So yes! Almost finished with my first semester.

Nursing is hard, yes ... But toughest? Let's not go overboard here

Specializes in Med-Tele; ED; ICU.
alyshih14 said:
There is a reason they say a Bsn degree is the hardest bachelors degree to obtain... So yes! Almost finished with my first semester.

Having earned degrees in engineering and chemistry, I can assure you that "they" have no idea what they're talking about.

Specializes in Allergy/ENT, Occ Health, LTC/Skilled.

I was already an LPN before entering my bridge so I knew it would be hard. But, I've been surprised, so far its 25% hard and 75% all time consuming. It's the marathon not the race sort of thing. Study, prioritize, you'll be just fine.

KindaBack said:
Having earned degrees in engineering and chemistry, I can assure you that "they" have no idea what they're talking about.

The first thing that entered my mind when I saw the comment about a BSN being "the hardest" degree was "Oh, Hell No. Put me in an engineering major and watch me sink..."

Nursing school being the hardest degree to earn by the Guinness Book of world records? Omg xD

No, shot down by the Guinness themselves. They clearly stated that they don't recognize that kind of stuff.

How the heck is medical school not difficult to nursing school?

Doctors go to school for 8 years just to be called a doctor, that doesn't include their field of speciality which nurses don't have to worry about. If they did, what would be the point of a doctor? 8 years of medical school + the field of their choosing(Neurology, cardiology, urology, etc to work at a hospital or clinic) doesn't sound like 1 year to 2 years of nursing school.

To say that Guinness book of world records verifies BSN as the hardest degree to complete is bogus and to say that would be like saying medical school is easy. Oh really? Then there would be more medical students and the shortage of doctors and nurses wouldn't exist. Nurses report to doctors so with that being said I don't think BSN would be the hardest degree in the world. :roflmao: I just think getting in and the standards while being in are held to an intimidating level.

A lot of people I know are in the nursing program at UNLV which is an accelerated program. I've seen one facebook post about the schedule she had and wow I couldn't believe it.

For some reason I can't wrap my head around a quantity over quality type program. If anything is done in a hurry, or rushed or whatever there is no time for learning. No time for learning means you have no idea what you're doing, which means POOR QUALITY which means F you you're fired and all that debt now owns you because no you can't find a job and your schooling was a waste of time.

Btw if anybody is going to try and shoot down my comment about nursing school being the toughest in the world and how bogus it is I had to take a chemistry class this past spring semester for the nursing program I'm planning to apply to and we SKIMMED the surface of other chemistry class. The dreaded O chem class, we learned about reactions but not about the mechanisms of what makes those reactions. I went to tutoring and SI and they told us for our special chem class that med students and other majors requiring chemistry have to learn about certain mechanisms in O chem, not nursing students. Medical students have to learn EVERYTHING even physics. As a nursing student, physics is not a pre-req. Neither is calculus classes for my program. College Algebra is the max we need. Above college algebra is pre-calculus 1 which is what I'm taking now along with microbiology. Med students don't get a chem class that skims the surface of almost every basic field of chemistry like we do. They have to take the MCAT which I've heard is a lot tougher than TEAS or HESI, a lot more expensive to take($300 to reserve a spot?) and med school being a lot tougher to get into. In California, for Physicians assistant, a friend of mine applied to a program and there were 98 spots they could fill and the counselor told her 3,000 apply a semester, it is very tough to get into.

So I disagree with nursing school being the toughest. I'd have to say Neurology school would be the hardest and also the longest(10 years? maybe it was between 4-8 years). A long time ago a physician told me that once when he said he was in medical school, neurology was the hardest the instructors said it was to pass.

I was in a math tutoring center one time and I forgot who it was that told me this but they said when they went into engineering school the first semester of engineering school, the instructor told them "look around you, all around you, you will ALL HATE each other, you will not make friends with each other, you will not have friends, the person on all sides of you will be your enemy, you will all be against each other because engineering is not easy. The slightest miscalculation in your math and measurements and you will be fired either for killing builders or for wasting budget money. If you want to know how many graduate engineering school, it's 40%."

I still think engineering is fascinating and the math you have to learn is ridiculous but physics and aeronautical engineering and mechanical engineering is just fascinating to me. I want to get into it just for the hell of it, not for a career. If I was an RN I'd take the classes required to second major in an engineering field.

Specializes in Med-Tele; ED; ICU.
TheAtomicStig_702 said:
they said when they went into engineering school the first semester of engineering school, the instructor told them "look around you, all around you, you will ALL HATE each other, you will not make friends with each other, you will not have friends, the person on all sides of you will be your enemy, you will all be against each other because engineering is not easy. The slightest miscalculation in your math and measurements and you will be fired either for killing builders or for wasting budget money. If you want to know how many graduate engineering school, it's 40%."

As a degreed engineer, that sounds absurd to me. Much of engineering studies require the students to work as teams because (a) real-world projects are generally much too large and complex to be done by an individual, and (b) generally require multidisciplinary input.

"You will all be against each other because engineering is not easy?" Doesn't that sound apocryphal to you? Why would the rigor of something set people against each other? In fact, it would tend to be just the opposite. Teams prevail where individuals fail.

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I still think engineering is fascinating and the math you have to learn is ridiculous but physics and aeronautical engineering and mechanical engineering is just fascinating to me. I want to get into it just for the hell of it, not for a career. If I was an RN I'd take the classes required to second major in an engineering field.

This makes me chuckle. The effort required to learn engineering is enormous and, like nursing, is just beginning with the completion of the formal education.

I will say with supreme conviction, though, that engineering was orders of magnitude more difficult and rigorous an academic discipline than was nursing. That's not to cast aspersions on nursing at all but simply an observation from someone who has done them both.

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