newpedirn08

Hi, So I am in my final year of graduate school and finished my first 2 weeks of clinical, and just feeling really incompetent.. I prepare and have an idea of what questions I need to ask, and then I go in and I guess I'm just too nervous and I forget things in the history and physical..my preceptor said I say "umm.." wayyy to much and that it looks like I don't know what I'm doing...I do well in my classes but having a hard time translating it to practice I guess..so I could really use some encouragement!

[color=#cc33cc]hi there, so i'm a new grad, i've been working in pedi ltc for a couple weeks now- i was feeling pretty good about my abilities last week, and then yesterday i had the day from hell and i was seriously doubting myself... it all started when i came into work, i was doing my assessments while my preceptor was talking to the supervisor about something- well, it turns out that something was me! apparently during my last shift there was a narcotic i forgot to sign out, and my supervisor got in trouble because he was supposed to be checking over what i did. i just had this awful feeling in my stomach that stuck for the rest of the day, i just felt like i couldn't get anything right, it seems like every day i end up doing something moronic... it didn't help that several hours later i was late finishing my med pass, and the final straw that did it for me was when i spilled one of the resident's meds after already putting half down the g-tube- my preceptor tried to reassure me that it wasn't a huge deal because there weren't any narcotics, and there was nothing we could do anyway since we didn't know how much she had gotten... but at that point i was already feeling like the biggest loser in the world- while he was telling me all this i was trying to hide how upset i was with myself, which i obviously didn't do a good job at because then he stopped an asked me if i was having a bad night, and i just lost it! i totally broke down crying/sobbing in front of him and in the middle of the hallway, i was so embarrassed but i couldn't help it... and then he gave me a really good pep talk and he was so nice that i just wanted to hug him, except that would have been weird because he's my coworker, but i guess i just finally had to vent my frustration at being a new grad and that was the way that it came out, unfortunately... of course, later on it was my turn to see the supervisor and fill out an incident report with her, which was also upsetting, but at least i had already cried so i was able to hold it together and chalk it all up to being a learning experience.

Hi everyone, I used this website a lot when I was studying for the nclex, so I figure I owe it to you guys to post some tips for studying- I passed with 75 questions. I can tell you that the infection control/precautions section on this website was huge! I had a lot of these types of questions, and all I had to do was think back to DEARPPPPMMSSI (search for infection control if you have no idea what I'm talking about). Other than that, there was a lot of priority (I bought the priority & delegation book that a lot of people had posted about- I didn't do the whole book, but it helped to practice a bunch of questions) I also had a lot of drugs, a lot of which I didn't recognize the names, but I could figure it out by looking at the ending of the drug name (e.g. pril = ACE inhibitor)- for studying drugs, if you are a visual learner, I would highly recommend this book of notecards that I bought at Borders, the company is mosby, and they're basically just flash cards with cartoons- these are fabulous! you can take them with you everywhere you go (and trust me, I did) and I found myself trying to picture the cards in my mind when I was taking the exam- there's another set of cards for fluids & electrolytes that was just as awesome And finally, I would just recommend that you do lots and lots of questions (I probably did about 3000, maybe more, I wasn't really keeping track)- and I would focus more on strategies for answering the test questions versus trying to study and relearn every single thing in your review book- there's just no way you're going to know everything, so if you're taking the test and you get a question and have no idea what the answer was (which definitely happened to me many times) you have to use test strategies- this is where doing one of the test prep courses comes in really handy- my school did MedsPublishing (you can check it out online if you're interested), we had a woman come in for a few days and it was awesome, we also had online practice questions available to us for a few months- I never did Kaplan, but it sounds like this was also helpful for a lot of people. I also tried out the NCSBN website- let me tell you the questions on this website are much harder than what you will see on nclex! so don't freak out... I also want to mention that I didn't sit there and go through every single section in my review book and do all the questions- that would just be too much for me. Instead, I did tons of questions like I said, and if there was a question that I had a really hard time with or didn't understand the rationale, I would go to my review book and look it up (I had a Saunders from a couple years ago- it's super intimidating because it's so huge). I would myself notes about it somewhere (my computer, flashcards, etc.) -I didn't always need to look at it again because I think the process of just writing something down for me was really helpful to learn stuff. Hope this helps!! Good luck everyone!!