Is nursing school...

It's a lot harder than I ever imagined.

no! it (so far) is way more boring, uninteresting, and utterly opposite from what i expected. i was expecting hard and fun challenging classes. 1st semester was a bunch of theory, history, ethics, gerontology (including a 40 page paper based on one elder of your choice), and communication classes. yuck! half way through people finally stared admitting how awful we all felt about 1st semester. i'd been worried it was just me. now granted, i start my first clinical semester next week so i'm hoping and expecting things to become a lot more like what i pictured. so far we've learned nothing skill or science related at all. i can't wait!!!! i just got my littmann cardiology iii so i'm stoked.

40 page paper? Good God.

40 page paper? good god.

yeah i almost quit in the middle. seriously! i was just thinking "this is so not what i want to do for a living". it did include my appendix with results of my "assessments" along with my 18 references that took up a couple of pages. i'm pretty jaded on the whole thing after that semester. it better get better and harder (in a good way)!

40 pages? What the hell for? To thoroughly waste your time? Do you think the teacher read all 40 pages for each student? I would have 3 inch borders on my paper and a font of like 22 to try and fill 40 pages! LOL

I hope you are exaggerating.

Wow, 40 page paper?

My first quarter included some theory/history too, but a hands-on physical assessment class and a brutal pharm class. I'm surprised you haven't done more medical/science stuff yet.

40 pages? what the hell for? to thoroughly waste your time? do you think the teacher read all 40 pages for each student? i would have 3 inch borders on my paper and a font of like 22 to try and fill 40 pages! lol

i hope you are exaggerating.

yes, i'd say to thoroughly waste our time. the prof was an awesome lady and really cared about what we wrote and gave a lot of feedback and graded pretty picky. i'd never teach a class that entailed that much grading time!

i'm exaggerating a bit. see my other post above.

i say "assessments" because we haven't actually learned how to do that yet but had to "practice" on an elder. whatever, it's over! =) too bad it has me so worried about the remaining 5 semesters.

I find the reading assignments to be boring too. Overall there isn't the intensity I expected, not yet, anyway! The assignments we need to do are pretty easy. The only thing about nursing school I find difficult so far is the reading load.

Yes and no. Yes because I knew there was going to be a lot of studying outside of class and a lot of information that needed to be learned. No because it's so boring. I think the only time I really enjoyed it was in the skills lab learning how to do things and even then we didn't get to practice on each other like I've done in the past so it was hard to know what you would actually do on a real person.

I found that the nursing faculty is extremely uplifting and genuinely want us to succeed and become nurses. (Which is the complete opposite of what a co-worker had told me)

I also found that Fundamentals is just that, so as boring as it is, it is the basis for practice so I had better stay awake, alert and know the material in order to progress to higher practices. All in all I think I am really going to enjoy nursing school, challenges and all!

Is it what I thought it would be?

Yeah pretty much. One pleasant surprise is the friends I've made. Being old, I thought I'd just be going through pretty much alone, but there are a lot of people near my age, and some of the young students are friends with us too.

Thank God no 40 page papers yet, though the writeups and care plan for ICU clinical each week run into many many pages. I keep thinking that maybe I could learn more in clinical if I wasn't up so late the nights before clinical doing paperwork. I think it depends on the individual student. I find I don't learn much from group projects and other busywork.

No - in a good way. I'm over halfway through, and it's much better than I expected (after spending too much time on this website). While very difficult and time consuming, it's not my entire life. I still have time to cook most nights, to watch some TV, and to go out and do something usually once each weekend. My instructors are generally tough but fair, most are really intelligent and good at what they teach (not all, but it's not going to be perfect). They seem to want us to succeed, and continually offer to give extra help to anyone who is struggling. Also, while hard to get, As are not a thing of the past. You just have to work much harder to earn them. It's not all roses, my school has some really annoying things about it, but on the whole I'm enjoying the experience so far!