IdrisSedai

At my school, you pretty much have to have straight As in all prerequisites to be competitive. From there they look at HESI and prior degrees to determine acceptance. My school only accepts 30 per campus though.

This is a difficult question to answer. My school has students assigned to several different floors for clinicals, so we all get a different experience. I was on a cardiac telemetry floor. I needed to know NSTEMI and STEMI pretty well, along with CABG procedures. DVTs also came up quite a bit. The thing is, any time the floor got an "odd" or "different" case, it would be assigned to students so that we got exposure. That's how I ended up seeing Guillain Barre and a noncompliant with new ileostomy pt. Don't stress about learning a bunch before the semester starts. Just watch or read the stuff that gets you excited about nursing and let it all happen. :)

I got Pumas. The style is called "Vikky". They're plain, white, leather lace-up shoes with no "breathing holes" for bodily fluids to leak into. They did the job for me, and they were comfy enough for 8 hour clinical shifts in my first semester.

It honestly just depends on what other priorities you have to juggle in your life and what your goals are for your grades. If you have to work full time AND want to get As, you'll likely not have much of a social life to speak of. If you are comfortable with Bs and don't have to work full time during school, you'll have plenty of time to be a social butterfly. Juggling priorities is a learned skill, but you CAN learn it. Just be honest with yourself about what all you aren't willing to sacrifice, and you should find a way to make everything balance.

NCLEX practice questions REALLY helped me for my first exam. If you have a success book or online content that gives you rationales for both the right and wrong answers, you should definitely take advantage. It really helps you understand the way they want you to think on the exams. Even if you don't get those extra two points, you can definitely make up for this on later tests. Take this as a learning opportunity- you've realized that the way you were initially studying isn't the best fit for you. You were only a couple points short of passing this one, though. Now that you've experienced what the tests are like, you can buckle down for the next one and bring your average up. For reference, the scores on my first exam ranged from 68-96. There were people in my class who did WAY worse than you did. I think our average was 88.

I'm working a full time job and a part time job (one shift a week) while in my first semester of nursing school. I've only had one exam so far- 100 NCLEX questions- and I made a 96%. I'm able to do it by cutting out basically all social life. I don't have a family life to speak of, so there aren't other obligations getting in the way. If I had literally any other obligation in my life, I'd definitely be struggling to keep my grades where I want them. Right now I'm devoting myself to studies, but when I feel myself getting close to a breakdown I'll probably coast a little bit.