what makes nursing school so hard?

dylansmama · Dec 17, 2008

The hardest part for me are the care plans :cry: All of our instructors, depending on who you get want something different. :confused: It's very frustrating. We get our patient info the night before clinical, and stay up all night doing the care plan. :yawn: Every time I thought my care plan was decent, it get ripped to shreds by the instructor. That is by far the hardest part. I have a husband and kids, so it's hard not spending a lot of time with them. :sniff: The grading scale sucks too. You can do it though! Get as many prereqs out of the way as you can!

lilo2010 · Dec 17, 2008

The worst part is the volume of work! Also learning to critically think! You can't just memorize the info for tests!

jackson145 · Dec 17, 2008

Not everyone thinks NS is hard. Compared to some of the jobs I've held over the years, NS has been a vacation for me.

I do not ever read my textbooks. I pay close attention during lectures and review the powerpoints the night before a test. This semester I've had a lot of papers to write, but I enjoy doing paperwork so it hasn't been an issue for me.

I would definitely finish every pre-req & co-req possible before NS starts. There's no reason to overload yourself during NS.

Also, do you have to work full or part-time during NS? That can go a long way towards making NS more difficult. I've been lucky enough not to have to work, but that means I've been broke the whole time.

As far as leisure time, I've had more during NS than I ever did when I was employed. I go out to eat and to the movies almost every weekend and I'm always checking out novels at the library, just for fun. I'm home before the school bus more than when I was working, so that's a bonus too! My childcare costs have plummeted.

I'm actually going to miss the laid-back atmosphere when school is finished and I have to re-join the "real world" again.

blue_yuina · Dec 17, 2008

nursing course is a big challenge... study, care and control that's what nursing is all about... what's making it so hard is when you are not a type of person who doesn't want to get stressed...

Iam46yearsold · Dec 17, 2008

I never found nursing school to be difficult, except when I partied to much. That was often. I had a great time. I still do.

Ms. Nurse Assistant, LPN · Dec 17, 2008

I am in my early 20s, I have no life anyway, no boyfriend, not many friends, no children..will nursing school be less stressful? All I have is me, my parents are willing to help me out until I graduate

WalkieTalkie, RN · Dec 17, 2008

Or what else really makes nursing school so horrible?

Two words: CARE PLANS

These are the bane of many a nursing student's existence. The problem with them is that teachers often get so caught up in the way they are supposed to be formatted, they forget about the content. Some of your more anal teachers will make you spend hours perfecting these worthless things.

At first, they do help you put two and two together (like why you do certain interventions and what you should be assessing). However, as you do more of them, you will often find that you repeat some of the same stuff over and over, and you will make up interventions just to please the teacher (i.e. they want 5 teaching things on your care plan, but you can only think of 3 because the patient was being a jerk/had multiple tests or visitors/has sundowner's, etc and didn't want to talk to you). Some teachers would require focused care plans like this, and if you didn't get all the stuff in that day, you would have to complete new one for the next clinical. Instead of having to do so much work, most of us would eventually make something up just to get it done and turn it in.

When you get into more advanced classes, like critical care, it can literally take hours to do a complete care plan. Some teachers want all the page numbers from where you got the "why" of why you were doing a specific intervention for a patient. This was bothersome because often times you don't remember where you read "keep the HOB 30 degrees during tube feedings" but you know it's the correct thing to do from a previous experience or something you have learned in class.

Another thing that makes nursing school hard is just the sheer number of things you have to do and remember on a daily basis. For example, my senior year, we had our preceptorship, which I was doing at night in the ICU. I would do 2-3 12 hour night shifts of this a week in addition to attending one day shift of public health clinical, going to classes, and working 2 12 hour shifts per week. If you don't have to work while in school, it would probably be less stressful.

Athenas83 · Dec 17, 2008

You'll be fine. You don't have to read every word in the textbook. Some books we hardly even opened. I recommend Saunders Comprehensive Review. Everything you need to know is in there and in your professors lectures/powerpoints.

Warpster · Dec 17, 2008

Anything you can manage to get out of the way before you start the core nursing classes will be an enormous help. I'm not talking only about the hard sciences, I'm also talking about the "scribble classes" that require a lot of papers, like English and the social sciences.

Once you start nursing classes, be prepared to say goodbye to your social life for the duration. Nursing school requires you learn a tremendous amount of information and how to apply it in a very short period of time. It is intense and no one ever manages to coast through it while maintaining a vibrant social life.

The simple act of surviving it is rewarding, though. In addition, you'll be a nurse when you get out, fully equipped for surviving the stress of the job.

Not_A_Hat_Person, RN · Dec 18, 2008

I definitely recommend completing as many pre-reqs and co-reqs as possible. I already had a BA, so I didn't have to take too many pre-reqs, but it took a year of night classes (including Saturday morning Chemistry) to get them done. I also ran into paperwork problems when I got married in the middle of the semster (great guy, bad idea).

Iam46yearsold · Dec 18, 2008

I am in my early 20s, I have no life anyway, no boyfriend, not many friends, no children..will nursing school be less stressful? All I have is me, my parents are willing to help me out until I graduate

How can you say you have no life. Have fun, Party. Nursing school is a blast, college is a blast, Life can be a lot of fun also. Have fun, study hard, have a life.