The work in nursing school

akulahawkRN, ADN, RN, EMT-P · Sep 23, 2012

I, for one, I'm glad that you are asking this question, even though people asked this before. A lot of the work involved in nursing school is reading. A lot of reading. While you are in class, you do take some notes. You should be doing a lot of reading about the subject that is going to be covered in class, before you get into class. That makes it much easier for you to understand the information that will be presented to you.

I cannot comment about any other program, so take what I have to say about mine with a large grain of salt. I say that only because my program may be very different from yours. In my program, they expect each student has already mastered the basics: anatomy and physiology, psychology (basic), microbiology, and the like. They expect that you will be able to read information and regurgitate it. They expect that he will be able to take information that has been presented to you, integrate it with what you already know, and be able to synthesize something new out of it. For students that are used to being able to read and regurgitate information, this can be a very big challenge.

Part of the homework that we do get is reading and answering questions. The questions however, are designed to get you to think about your answer, not just regurgitate what the book wants you to. I hope you are noticing a theme here! We do have some projects from time to time, but they are not large term paper type, rather they are specific to a particular topic to increase your knowledge in that particular area.

As far as deadlines are concerned, some of our deadlines are soft, some are rather rigid. Regardless, they do have deadlines that you must meet. There are a lot of them. The reason for that is to get you to pay attention to the details. As nurses, we live and die and lose our licenses by those details. That is why you need to keep up with that kind of stuff.

As far as you're concerned about labs and clinicals, please understand that they are both a learning environment and a patient care environment. They expect you to learn and apply what you have learned, in a safe manner. The lab time that you get is what will teach you the safe way to do it. The clinical time that you get is going to solidify what you know about how to do the procedures safely, and introduce you to some of the various units/floors in hospitals and other clinical areas that you may work in as a nurse. Most of the nurses that I have worked with so far have been very supportive. Some you do have to watch out for, but if you are used to office politics, it is relatively easy. I am not completely finished with my program. It is my understanding that we have at least one professor/instructor that does not like male students. That does not mean that I feel at all intimidated, rather I just have to keep my eyes open because of that though, and be a bit more "squared away" than some of my (female) classmates. By and large though, my instructors have wanted their students to do well, and succeed because they know that someday, those students will be nurses that could very well take care of them, their families, and/or their friends.

Is it possible to work through school? Yes, depending upon your work and school schedule... and home schedule. I wouldn't recommend working and going to nursing school, unless you absolutely have to. The workload can be (and sometimes is) absolutely incredible if you have to do both. I count myself very lucky in that regard because I have a job that allows me the time to study because otherwise I wouldn't be able to work and go to school. Presently, I'm able to do about 1/2 my studying at work. That's a huge burden that I'd hate to have bear only at home. I can not stress it enough though. If you can afford to not work during nursing school, don't. I wish I had more time to do study groups than I do. Working and going to school is a very fast way to burnout... and at one point, it got to the point where I'd lost so much sleep that I very nearly became unsafe, though not to the point where I'd endangered anyone. It (literally) was a good wake-up call to show me just when I start to reach that point. I've made sure I'm rested enough to do the job safely, and have had zero problems since then. If I was that tired in another job that I once held, I could have easily remained safe... but I'd been very well used to doing that job for so long that I could literally do that job (which was very intense patient care stuff) while dog/dead tired. Don't let yourself get that tired while you're in school and still learning how to be a nurse.