Feistn

I think nursing school, unfortunately, attracts a certain "type." These types are control freaks who literally are not happy unless they're complaining about something. Unfortunately, these types leave nursing school and become nurses who, guess what? They're control freaks and they complain about everything. That other hospital is SOOOOOOOO much better than this hospital, and they should be lucky I work here? If it's so much greater there, go work there. I hate nights soooo much, I'm tired of it, I should quit. Then do it. We had an info session for the next semester and you wanna know what happened? Someone "complained" about the info session to someone other than the professor giving the info session, going over her head, when she EXPRESSLY ASKED that if students have a problem with her teaching style, information given, ect, they come to her. Add to the top of that students who are barely passing and it's everyone else's fault, and you've got some serious whiney pants people. I avoid these people like the plague.

Put the shoe on the other foot. How upset would YOU be if your nursing instructor dropped "hints" about their faith or values system that didn't match yours? I'm a student in MN, and there was a brief, thankfully benign incident where an instructor told a gay student how disappointed she was that the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage didn't pass. Luckily, she recovered well, and the student in question is not a boat rocker and is generally pretty mellow. That could have gotten ugly real fast. I do have instructors who mention going to church, ect, or things they went to do that are faith-based in conversation, and that is totally fine. What is NOT fine is seeking students out to suggest how they should cope with the stresses of nursing school. Trust me when I tell you that the students who want that kind of input will seek you out. On our campus, the professors that are "allies" have a sticker on their doors. It's never brought up, never solicited, never offered. We all know what it means. And I have one instructor who had an Obama pin in a place in her office that I don't think anyone else would have thought to look. And even then I would be super careful. Nursing students are super sweet until something doesn't go their way, and then they're hell-demons. It's all fun and games until someone gets kicked out because of bad clinical performance or not being able to cut it academically. Trust me when I tell you they will make a federal case out of you "sharing" your faith. More likely than not they won't get anywhere, but do you even want to go there?

Get out. You need to say no to your parents, and nursing school is too darned hard if you don't even want to be doing it. You need to tell them that you're not continuing, you're moving out, and you're pursuing x career path. They'll either freak or they'll leave it alone. You have to live for you, not them. I would find someone to help guide you as you leave. Yes, leaving home is scary, but you'll figure it out. It's really just a matter of paying your bills on time. You'll hit some rough patches; don't look at them as failures, look at them as lessons.

I said treat, but only if treating means having a "come to Jesus" talk with her. That you are willing to help her in study group, but by the time it's the night before the exam, it's too late. That you gave her lots of opportunities to study with you, and she sure could have showed up to class, but didn't. Basically, she can get help on your study days. The night before the exam, you're not going to answer calls from her. Either she wants to pass or she doesn't. Only she can decide if she'd rather party or graduate.

I find I need to have some constraints on my schedule. There is such a thing as "too much studying." sometimes you just have to sit down with the attitude of "I'm only gonna do what I can do, and that's it." If you're busy all day, and you know you ONLY have an hour to study, you're gonna get it done. If I have all day to do something? Chances are way too good that I've wasted most of the day watching TV, being on FB, or whatever, and then it's 5 PM and I haven't done squat.

You might be surprised. Think about this for a minute. Panicking is not going to help you. Panicking while you study? You might as well just go watch TV or something for all the good it's gonna do you. You have to have a positive attitude. The good news? You only need two percentage points to pass, and the final is worth 40% of your grade. It REALLY doesn't take too much to raise your grade by 2 percentage points.

The ones you like. Seriously, they will tell you what to learn and how to learn it. If you try and read your textbooks early, you'll just be chasing your tail. The things you should brush up on are med terminology, CNA skills because they won't teach this and will assume you will be comfortable doing all of them, and med dosages, because there will be a test that you have to pass with 100% or risk losing your spot in the program. Beyond that, just enjoy your summer. You could start looking at NCLEX books mainly for the test strategies. But like I said... read the stuff you like, because you won't have much time for fun reading when school is in session!

Do not buy one single solitary thing until they tell you to. You're going to be laying out 1K in books, supplies, ect easily. They'll probably tell you at this meeting. There isn't really a good way to get ahead. Keep practicing your medical dosages, brush up on CNA skills, and relax. You don't know how the content will be presented, and you don't know which parts your professors will emphasize. I thought I'd try and get some reading done before both semesters, before the assignments were posted. I ended up having to reread it when I got the course objectives anyway.

Maybe also make a call to HR and see how fast you accrue vacation days. I'm working a part time job at a hospital, and I'm basically burning up all of my vacation to do clinicals this spring. It's not ideal, but it will get you the job, and depending on your rotation, you might still end up with nice long weeks/weekends to take vacations in the summer if you want to.

Have you gone for the teachers for help about how to study for their exams? They don't respond well to 'but it's not fair' but they do respond well to 'how can I do better?' Also, lots of good people don't make it through nursing school. It doesn't make you a failure. It just means you're not a nurse. There are many routes to happiness, and they don't all pass through the NCLEX.

I use them and love them. I bought old copies of the books just in case, but honestly, I've very rarely used them. With the ebooks, you can get them online or on a tablet. I have the three heaviest weight and heaviest used books on an iPad, and it's searchable, and it's even sometimes nice seeing the material presented on a smaller page. I don't know how tech savvy you are, but my grades from my first semester were fine, and my bookbag was my purse, and I was the envy of many in the class.

I'm saying a on the restraints. I work in a psych unit, and you DO NOT apply restraints without a nurse's say so. Generally a nurse is standing right there when it gets to the point where restraints are needed.

I've heard that there are many, many BSN programs out there, and they take into account your entire academic performance, not just nursing school. The goals is to have 80% of all RNs be BSN qualified by 2020, which is not that far off. A C will get you your degree. As far as the hospital is concerned, you could try and get a job now as a PCA or whatever, or absolute worst case scenario, you work LTC/TCU or homecare to gain experience. My nursing school instructor said that no one has EVER asked her what her grades were. If you passed nursing school with C's you passed nursing school, especially considering that C was what other college students know as a B.

I do note cards too (online so I can use the app on my phone), but I've discovered that listening to lectures is EXTREMELY helpful to me. Even when I don't think I'm listening or retaining much, it helps me. The best score I had this semester was when I was doing this. Drawing pictures, even if they're dumb, also helps me.

I asked an experienced psych nurse about this. He said that when you really think about it, everyone who comes into the hospital is having some kind of mental health crisis, whether it's depression, anxiety, paranoia, hostility or whatever. In order for you to deal with this person, and before you can even get to the point where your "skills" are going to make a darned bit of good, you're going to need to get through this barrier. Patients don't remember how awesome your mad IV skillz were as much as they remember how you made them feel.

I just got hired as a mental health associate at a psych department in a hospital. They just opened a new building. Each hospital is different, but in this unit, they do plenty of "medical" things, and nurses float from other units to psych when the need arises. One of the nurses I was hired with said that when you think about it, everyone who is coming into a hospital is having some kind of mental crisis, whether they're anxious, hostile, scared, depressed or whatever. And the statistics showed us that nurses in ICU were as or more likely to experience physical violence than psych nurses. Think about it... you can brush up your skills, but either you know how to relate to patients or you don't. That can't be taught.

You're working at a state facility, is there a union contract of any kind? Honestly, when I worked in a union/civil service environment (not nursing), it was not uncommon for a manager to decide that the easiest solution was to not force the unwilling worker but instead shift the work/dirty jobs to the willing/hardworking employee. It's not fair, and if you are represented by a union, I would make a stink about it. It sort of sounds like your manager either got tired of fighting with those day charge nurses, or they're such long term employees that there's nothing she can do about it (per the union). Or there's a favoritism component. In any case, there is nothing you can do about any of these circumstances unless there is a union, and even that will get you labeled a trouble maker. I'd put in enough time to say that you "did" the charge nurse thing so you can put it on your resume and start looking.

I asked a practicing nurse this question during my training at the hospital. He said that the people that freaked out about grades, and got "perfect" grades all through nursing school were actually less prepared than those who got through with Bs and Cs. Real life isn't the textbook, and real life isn't perfect. I told this to my CI, and she said the same thing, that the classmates of hers who got A's all through nursing school are no longer nurses. She said no one has ever asked her what her grade was in her first semester of nursing school. Even if you're thinking of advanced practice, the key there is going to be academic performance AND experience.

In my program, the first lecture we had was on HIPAA violations. We have had to be very careful about it. If you DO use your phone for some reason (Davis drug guide app, watch with second hand), you need to CHECK WITH YOUR INSTRUCTOR FIRST. Hospitals don't even let their staff have their phones on their person. This showed extremely poor judgment. Would you want someone taking a picture of your surgery, even if you were unidentified. Our program made it clear that the biggest thing people are called for is HIPAA violations. As we've learned, oftentimes it is less about the actual harm than how it can be perceived. You totally could have posted that on FB or whatever, and it would have been a HUGE scandal for the hospital. This is no joke. They get sued for this, and the news stations would love nothing more than to have a juicy, salacious story about a breach of privacy. If I were you, I would go in with all of the information they've taught you about HIPAA, professional boundaries and outline exactly how your actions went against school policy, and then I would say this experience provided you with a learning experience that ensures you will NEVER be so careless about patient privacy again, and that in your practice, you will not carry your cell phone on your person during a shift.

I don't know what your money situation is, but is it at all practical to do one of those make and take meal things (if they still exist?) And I agree that he's trying to help you. Maybe it's time to decide that one or two nights a week you will make dinner, and make it be simple. Tacos do not take that long to make, neither does spaghetti, neither does a crock pot full of chili. Surely you have 15 minutes per day to do dishes or something. Maybe it's time to involve the kids and reward them for taking on more responsibilities. Kids like to be helpful, and gaining the confidence knowing that they have new skills and responsibilities is extremely valuable. Even if it's something like emptying the house trash into the big trash every day, or run around and pick up all the toys you can pick up in 10 minutes. And if the money is there, maybe this is one of those times where it would be worth hiring a cleaning person 1-2 times a month for your sanity and to give him a break.

There are some programs that say that grades past a certain point don't matter anymore. You've gotten a 4.0 on your prereqs, you're volunteering at a hospital. I had a poor GPA from college, and I knew that to get into any program, I was going to need a 4.0 on prereqs, an outstanding test score, and some job experience. I found a program that only considered your last 30 credits, make experience a requirement, and had a placement test (I'm a pretty good tester). I'm finishing semester 1. There are other classmates with similar stories. Our program recognizes that people do change, and they're more interested in current performance, and maybe more impressed by people who turned around a bad experience.

I personally would try many learning styles. Try drawing pictures. Try listening to the lectures. Do you fall asleep with a certain TV show or movie playing? And then you know that movie or show by heart practically? How much effort on your part did that take? Yup, that's right! NONE! Play games with the questions. Do movements while learning them (I knew someone who learned the Krebs cycle by making a walkable map on her floor). Keep your study sessions short (15-30 minutes) and do something different between the study sessions (clean, go for a short walk, surf the net). Honestly, if you're diagnosed with ADHD and taking a medication, you should also be seeing a therapist who can help you problem solve these situations. That is what therapy is meant to do. And having repeated classes myownself for no better reason than I was lazy/stupid the first time I took it, I can tell you that the second time around really does make stuff stick. My brother in law had to take each semester of calculus for a computer science degree twice except the last one. Know why he didn't have to take that twice? Because you needed a certain grade to go on, not to pass. D means degree (well, not in nursing school, but in computer science it does!). Guess what? He's working for the Mayo system in IT. My point is.. it happens. It is not the end of the world. When you graduate and pass your NCLEX, no one is going to ask what your grade was in some semester.

I just started a hospital job too. Honestly, I had to skip a lecture to go to the training, and it turns out that one of the questions on the exam came from my training session! I really believe that practical experience, hands on experience, is so much more meaningful than being in a lab or being in lecture. I will be working 0.5 nights, but I know of people in my job who went through their entire nursing programs working nights, and I know other people in my program who are doing well working nights. I will be working in mental health, and during the interview, the nurse manager SUGGESTED I study during the night, because well..... ain't like there are gonna be a lot of groups or discussions or even restraints (hopefully). I took this job because I want to work in a hospital when I graduate, and since I'm getting an ADN, this is the best way to get there. The absolutely worst thing that could happen is you could realize it's not working. The absolutely worst thing would be if your new supervisor didn't want to work with you (mine has promised that she will). I think you should also understand your own study habits and tendencies. Find other students who worked during second semester and ask them how they did it. If you barely passed first semester and you weren't working, maybe this isn't a good idea. On the other hand, I have learned that I do better when I have to squeeze time in and prioritize it rather than when I've got "all day" and little constraints on my day.

I don't think there is any intentional "weeding out," but I do think that they are not going to be sympathetic to people who aren't up to snuff. This isn't to be mean; it's much better to fail a semester of nursing school than to get out into practice and get in big trouble with your employer, the nursing board, or even the court system. They've only got so many spots available, I think they want to pick the students who are going to succeed. It obviously doesn't work out that way (one person has already been dismissed from the program in my semester, and I suspect there are 5-10 people on the bubble), but that is not for lack of instruction or support by the instructors.

Contact your program. I'm 100% certain there's a procedure in place for this circumstance. There was in my program. You will probably have to fill out a form outlining why you didn't get the vaccine, and it will probably require a doctor's signature. My best, big picture advice to you is to learn how to stop "freaking out." The people that freak out in nursing school don't do as well, and frankly, the nurses who freak out burn out. Panic doesn't make you an effective learner or decision maker. There is usually a solution to any circumstance, and most of what nursing school aims to teach each of us is how to be critical thinkers. You will have challenges on the path to nursing school; do yourself a favor and remember that each of these are learning opportunities, not judgments on your character or intellect.