what is nursing school like?

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what is the typical schedule like? do you all go mon thru fri 8 to 3 pm? do you have to do clinicals several times a week while you take courses? can you really work a fulltime job and go to nursing school and still get about 5 hours of sleep a nite?

Specializes in neuro/ortho med surge 4.

What I found hard about nursing school was all of the clinical prep time. Go in and get your patient assignment for the next day. Look up all of the meds the patient was on for the entire day. Know why that patient was taking them, adverse effects, interactions with other meds they may be on, normal dose of that med, and how that medication worked. Just the medications alone could have taken 5-6 hrs to do. Then we had to do the patients main diagnosis and describe it in our own words. Then come up with 3 nursing interventions for said diagnosis. Then look up their medical history and define what those secondary diagnoses were. If there were any treatments we had better know what the treatments were and why they were getting them. If we had 2 patients we had to do all of this on 2 patients. Needless to say there was hardly any sleep the night before clinical.

Then when we got to clinical there were all types of paperwork type assignments that had to be completed and you had to ask your patient or another nurse questions depending on the assignment. One such assignment was in risk management. All of these extra paperwork type assignments had to be completed as well as detailed care plans for the patients you had in 2 days time.

I wish clinical had actually been more hands on rather than busy work type of things. Then you would have many chapters to read for the exams. Never once could finish all of the reading. There was so much reading that you would forget what you read. Now I see students where I work actually looking up all of the meds the patient is on while at clinical. Do they not have to prep for clinical? I don't understand this at all. I guess it depends on where you go to school.

Some of the instructors were terrible. I had one who had me in tears many times during my last semester as a student. I am just glad the nightmare that was nursing school is over. I still have nightmares about it. Being a nurse is so much better in my opinion than school.

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We don't get to prep for clinicals, we get there at 0645 and get our assignments. Then we listen to report. We look up meds on the fly, get all the information from report and from the chart. I look up all the meds first thing, make sure to write down the times of each med, do assessments on my two pts before giving meds. Get all this done before 0800. then our day is either really busy or slow.Usually plan of cares take around 45 minutes to get all the info(so there is 1.15 hr. gone) Plan of cares, which it is like a mini care plan(nursing dx for pt, short and long term goals, 3 interventions, 3 rationals for those interventions, and results of those short and long term goals) everyday. On each pt that we care for. What a pain in the buttocks! So we have to find out everything about the pts: labs, diagnostics, H&H, previous health problems, and everything else! It is a pain, especially for only 10 pts per day....grr, It is better than a 30 pg care plan, but worse, because there is so many. It makes my head spin!:uhoh3:

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We don't get to prep for clinicals, we get there at 0645 and get our assignments. Then we listen to report. We look up meds on the fly, get all the information from report and from the chart. I look up all the meds first thing, make sure to write down the times of each med, do assessments on my two pts before giving meds. Get all this done before 0800. then our day is either really busy or slow.Usually plan of cares take around 45 minutes to get all the info(so there is 1.15 hr. gone) Plan of cares, which it is like a mini care plan(nursing dx for pt, short and long term goals, 3 interventions, 3 rationals for those interventions, and results of those short and long term goals) everyday. On each pt that we care for. What a pain in the buttocks! So we have to find out everything about the pts: labs, diagnostics, H&H, previous health problems, and everything else! It is a pain, especially for only 10 pts per day....grr, It is better than a 30 pg care plan, but worse, because there is so many. It makes my head spin!:uhoh3:

pretty much how it is for us too. It's ok! We'll get through it :D

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Many years ago, I went to a night/weekend school and held a full time m-f 8-5 job. Its doable if you're dedicated!!

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Specializes in Peds Medical Floor.

Each semester we do less. At first we had to look everything up before hand and write stuff out. Then we just got assignments early and did some of the paperwork, not all. Now we don't get anything early. Just like you would at in the real world. :rolleyes:

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Each semester we do less. At first we had to look everything up before hand and write stuff out. Then we just got assignments early and did some of the paperwork, not all. Now we don't get anything early. Just like you would at in the real world. :rolleyes:

O.O Oh god, now I'm scared for the rest of the semesters LOL.

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Specializes in MICU - CCRN, IR, Vascular Surgery.
What I found hard about nursing school was all of the clinical prep time. Go in and get your patient assignment for the next day. Look up all of the meds the patient was on for the entire day. Know why that patient was taking them, adverse effects, interactions with other meds they may be on, normal dose of that med, and how that medication worked. Just the medications alone could have taken 5-6 hrs to do. Then we had to do the patients main diagnosis and describe it in our own words. Then come up with 3 nursing interventions for said diagnosis. Then look up their medical history and define what those secondary diagnoses were. If there were any treatments we had better know what the treatments were and why they were getting them. If we had 2 patients we had to do all of this on 2 patients. Needless to say there was hardly any sleep the night before clinical.

Then when we got to clinical there were all types of paperwork type assignments that had to be completed and you had to ask your patient or another nurse questions depending on the assignment. One such assignment was in risk management. All of these extra paperwork type assignments had to be completed as well as detailed care plans for the patients you had in 2 days time.

I wish clinical had actually been more hands on rather than busy work type of things. Then you would have many chapters to read for the exams. Never once could finish all of the reading. There was so much reading that you would forget what you read. Now I see students where I work actually looking up all of the meds the patient is on while at clinical. Do they not have to prep for clinical? I don't understand this at all. I guess it depends on where you go to school.

Some of the instructors were terrible. I had one who had me in tears many times during my last semester as a student. I am just glad the nightmare that was nursing school is over. I still have nightmares about it. Being a nurse is so much better in my opinion than school.

We don't get to find out our patient the day before. We show up at 0630 and get a report sheet and the teacher assigns the patients that we'll have. Then we listen to report from our nurses and get going on our day.

We have to do and chart a full head to toe assessment on each patient every 4 hours. If we're passing meds that day, we have to go and look up the meds after assessing and be ready to start passing asap. For the patient we have a care plan on (only 1 care plan no matter how many patients) we have to know their entire history, every single medication, treatment, procedure, all of their labs (and write up why they had each one done and why any particular one is abnormal so like a paragraph for each test in a CBC or CMP, etc), research the pathophysiology of their admitting diagnoses, compare what we're seeing in real life to what the book says we would see with a normal patient with that disease, write out all of the discharge planning, and then write an actual nursing care plan too. The blank templates for our clinical homework are 20 pages, once they're filled out they usually end up being close to 30 pages.

Sometimes I wish that we got to pick our patient the night before so we could walk into clinical in the morning actually knowing something about what we'd be seeing but I guess you don't really get to do that as a nurse so...

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Specializes in chemical dependency detox/psych.

The first semester and second semester we would have to go there the day/night before clinicals and look up all sorts of info (meds, h&p, dx, do mini-care plans) about our patient(s). Then, the 3rd and 4th, everything else was done the morning of the clinical. We would find out our patient assignments at 0530 and start writing like mad. By 0600, instructor would show up and start helping us with any questions in the paperwork. 0700, report started, afterwards we assumed total care for the patient(s). 3rd semester we started with 1 patient, and by the end of that clinical, we worked our way up to 2-3. If there were IVs, we weren't allowed to do IV meds at the beginning of the 3rd semester, but by end of 3rd, we had to find our instructor to do those, too. Following the clinical, we always had "wrap up" assignments on our patients. And, of course, there were always the group projects or papers that needed to be written.

Honestly, the lecture tests weren't all that bad for me. It was always the clinicals and paperwork/assignments that were the killer, in regards to amount of time to complete them.

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