WheatGerm

Personally, I don't care if someone has tattoos/dyed hair and wouldn't think they were incompetent. HOWEVER...this seems like a bad idea since you already know that your manager isn't super into it. Why don't you get those clip on dyed hair strands and clip them into your hair on your days off, then remove them before going in to work?

Our instructors always had us perform the task with them watching, or went in to talk to the patient about the level of care. Even if our instructor was passing meds with a few students, she would either have us wait to do the assessment before watching us do it a second time (if the patient was amenable) or she would just make sure to watch us do it another week. Personally I find some of those categories you mentioned hard to observe regardless of whether or not you were standing right next to the student! "Recognizing diversity"?? To me that would be something that is a bit hard to grade so good luck to you on that one!

I agree with Jedrnurse. Also I would say that usually the first two weeks of a program are probably fairly easy, with the least amount of work so you should be able to push through. It won't be fun, but it will be nice to have it out of the way knowing that you could still used your boss as a reference in the future.

Thank you! I just wanted to make sure I shouldn't be running out to buy scrubs...I don't have any! The last area I was in required nurses to wear certain scrub colors or uniforms from the hospital so I didn't want to waste money on fun scrubs if we weren't allowed to wear them!

Does anyone know anything about what happens after our first day of orientation? It was explained to me that there would be mostly classroom type activities for the first couple of weeks, but I have no idea on the dress code/locations of this. any ideas?

Seriously that's how I felt. I got a couple questions regarding the same topic and was like...oh no, I certainly didn't learn this in nursing school! But I must have known more than I thought I did since I passed. Apparently this feeling of thinking the questions were really hard is a good sign! Good luck to you, and even if you don't pass you just need to try again. Plenty of people on this forum have taken the NCLEX more than twice and they're still here to talk about it!

Do they have any specific instructions regarding contacting them? When I applied for my job it specifically stated not to contact them because they had too many applicants to be receiving update emails from. If there isn't that policy though, I wouldn't think that there would be any harm in following up to see.

You can't listen to other people on this one, really. You know how you were in previous school environments, so you really need to learn and take note from that. Personally I was an excellent student in high school, average in college (non-nursing degree) and then was an excellent nursing student in my ADN program. Listening to others in my program you would have thought we were going to completely different schools. I think a lot of people over studied to the point of being comical. They would rush off to the library and spend hours going over the material that was just lectured about, and sometimes the reading was only around 25 pages. You shouldn't need hours to do that! Be honest with yourself and your studying. I have found a lot of people who "studied" for four hours straight maybe studied for about 1 hour and the rest was goofing off. Just be smarter with your studying, do the reading and make some notecards and call it a day. Take a few days off, it won't ruin your grades and probably will improve them since you wouldn't be constantly cramming.

I would encourage you to think about this a bit more. Only reason being that your exhaustion working as an assistant may be stemming from the fact that you are stressed in general with school as well. Do you think you would feel different about nursing if you didn't have that pressure of grades/work? All that being said, nursing isn't for everyone. I think you do need to see if you have other issues causing your depression/loneliness that is making you feel negatively towards nursing as a career, because personally I would hate to throw away that time/money due to other issues that I could potentially control.

I don't personally have a Surface, but a lot of my friends do and love it. The fact that you can use it as both a tablet and laptop is really neat, and it is very light. You can also get a discount on it for being a student! I will say however that if you do not necessarily want a new laptop you might not need one. I know my school had requirements for what would be best and my computer was way below that (still using one from 2007!). Just food for thought that you could always see how your computer does if you don't currently have issues with it to save some money.

Did you send a thank you to the person you interviewed with? If not, you could always send an email thanking them for the interview and say that you're interested in the position and see if that gets you a response. I don't think it seems unreasonable after 2.5 weeks to check in and see what's going on.

I think maybe one of the issues at play is whether or not the new grads have had a job before. I used to work at a non-nursing job that required 12+ hour days, weekends, holidays, random hour long shifts at night, etc. I never had an issue with it, but that's probably because I have been in the workforce since 14. I noticed a lot of people I went to school with would say things about how they didn't know how they could give up weekends, but they had never had a job before and I think they didn't understand a lot of workplace dynamics as well. The dynamics thing includes following instructions from a DON, etc. and also just in general interactions with co-workers. I do have to disagree though that new nurses who say they are working in LTC since they couldn't get a hospital job are entitled. I mean, personally I wouldn't want to work in LTC over a hospital due to future career goals but I don't think that makes me entitled, just not my thing.

You could always make a quick little budget to make sure it will work for you. Obviously you can't count the benefit of having better hours in general, but I would want to make sure that with a pay cut I would be able to make ends meet. Things would go from good to bad really quickly otherwise. At the very least I would subtract that amount that you spend in childcare from the amount that you made last year and see if that is close to your new salary. Then you'll know if some other changes in your life will need to be made.

I was dropping in to say the same thing. There are fine nurses everywhere - and thank goodness for that!

Although I'm sure this would increase the amount of people continuing their education, you have to remember that everyone is not cut out for college or wants to go to college. My brother, for example, would have been able to go to school if he chose to do so. However, he decided it wasn't for him and has moved on to pursue other things. And in terms of nursing, there still are going to be qualifications that need to be met and prereqs. Just because it will be free doesn't mean the market will be flooded with these awful and unqualified nurses.... As much as it would be nice to have free schooling after you've already paid for it, hey, you learn from having to deal with loans and how to budget.