Why do some people assume NS is easy?

Nursing Students General Students

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I'm not talking about other nursing students, but the general public. Heck, even patients!

I have had a patient ask me was I in nursing school (obviously). She then asked how far along I was and how long was the program. I told her it was a 4 year degree with 3 years of nursing classes (at my school). She said "What?! For a nurse?" Granted, she was out of it and in pain, but it was just the way she said it. The general public is really uneducated on what nurses actually do and their schooling. We need to work on improving that so people don't just think we are all assistants who work under the doctor.

Then there are the people who call themselves nurses, or have others call them nurses, when they are medical assistants and such. I'm not going through all this rigamorue in school to be compared to someone with a certificate who went to school for a few months. I'm sorry but that's not a good look.

Nurses might as well be aliens because apparently who we are and what we do is a mystery covered by the CIA.

Specializes in Urgent Care NP, Emergency Nursing, Camp Nursing.
Oh I'm sorry, are you in my class? Did you take my chemistry course with me? :rolleyes:

"Real" organic or not, we still learned and were tested over concepts of organic chemistry. I made a typo there - "one test of being Organic" is what it's supposed to say. I don't know if you realize how arrogant you've come off in your posts, but please do not insult my school or its program and call its prerequisites wimpy.

First, I have reasons for understanding nursing school prerequisite requirements that, for the sake of my own privacy, I will not discuss in an open forum thread. You can pm me about it.

As for my supposed arrogance, it's no more than when I state that equivalent courses at a community college and a four-year school will not be taught or graded at the same level of difficulty.

Lastly, the latter portions of my post were general statements about nursing education, not about your own program. It was not my intention or fault that you read my response to ImThatGuy as a direct attack on you.

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Did I cheese someone off?

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I had a 4.0 my first semester even while taking 17 hours. It gets way harder after you move out of the realm of normal assessments and relatively healthy patients, in my opinion. Are you doing 12 hour clinicals, performing skills beyond a CNA's scope of practice on patients, or writing out the long care plans yet? I don't think people are blowing it out of proportion either, because some schools really are hard and have high expectations of their students, both in grades and their clinical conduct. There was someone here who posted in another thread that less than an 84% is failing in their program! :uhoh3:

Around what semester is that usually? Med-Surg II?

I was at clinical today and there were 4 of us from my school, me included, and 2 from another local school. They are supposed to be one of the best nursing schools in the state, but all day, I swear I never saw them move out the hallway. They were just doing paperwork. However, I think they only had one patient whereas we have two, but I told myself, "Man, if our instructors saw us standing around and sitting down we would be burned at the stakes!" The instructors got textbooks for them and everything. In the meantime, I was figuring out how to comfort my patient with the outrageously high AST/ALT levels and severe pain who was crying because doctors that were basically telling her nothing is wrong. That was tough. I wanted to cry with her!

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I have honestly never had a person tell me that nursing school was easy. I usually get the opposite response, followed by a "how exactly do you have time for that" kind of statement.

I honestly don't care if people think it's easy, and my patients may never know how much responsibility for their life and well being are in my hands. The point is that I know, and I'll do my job accordingly. ;)

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Yes, yes you did cheese them lol

I think people (especially people here on Allnurses) tend to blow the whole "OMG nursing school is soooo hard" thing way out of proportion.

That is a very true statement. SOMETIMES(don't anyone tell me that I said everyone) when people are unhappy, they tend to bend the truth a bit in their favor. I also agree that nursing is easier and less complex than Biology and Chemistry. Yes, nursing school did have some difficult parts to it, but the requirements are still far easier than most other majors. And to anyone who is offended by that statement, go take a test in Organic, Physics II, Bio II, Biochemistry, or any other science class and tell me which is more difficult. The Math problems in those classes take 4-5+ formulas, theories, critical thinking, etc. and put it into ONE math problem that starts on 1 page and finishes on the next with symbols you couldn't even imagine. But dimensional analysis is nothing but multiply and divide with a decimal here or there. Now I'm not trying to discount anyone who has difficulty with nursing school or nursing math..like they said, some things are more difficult for some than others. The fact of the matter is, I hear some students who complain that they had to take ANY math or ANY microbiology. Their reasoning is "We're not doctors, why do we need to know about the disease". Those people are in the wrong school if you ask me

And sidenote...real organic is just that, real organic. Having a TEST over some concepts related to organic chemistry is definitely not the same thing. That's just like saying, "we had a test over Cancer, and cancer drugs..so we basically learned a full course worth of cancer and it's medications." And I'm not insulting your school or saying it's wimpy..just saying a test over something doesn't mean it's the same as taking the full course

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Specializes in Emergency Dept. Trauma. Pediatrics.

There is a post in the general nursing section where a nurse just posted about a new policy at her work that says the nurses must make the toast for the patients in the morning. Stuff like that right there is why people thing it doesn't take much to be a nurse.

When we come taking their special toast orders doesn't seem like like we must have a lot of education. It's one thing to go in on the AM shift to do your assesment and breakfast just got there and you are helping them set it up while talking to them, it's another to have us play the role of dietary as well as other roles we have to play outside of nursing.

There is nothing wrong with being a custodian or in food services or being aide. But I didn't spend years in college and tons and tons of money so this could be my role.

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Specializes in being a Credible Source.
Yes, yes you did cheese them lol

That is a very true statement. SOMETIMES(don't anyone tell me that I said everyone) when people are unhappy, they tend to bend the truth a bit in their favor. I also agree that nursing is easier and less complex than Biology and Chemistry. Yes, nursing school did have some difficult parts to it, but the requirements are still far easier than most other majors. And to anyone who is offended by that statement, go take a test in Organic, Physics II, Bio II, Biochemistry, or any other science class and tell me which is more difficult. The Math problems in those classes take 4-5+ formulas, theories, critical thinking, etc. and put it into ONE math problem that starts on 1 page and finishes on the next with symbols you couldn't even imagine. But dimensional analysis is nothing but multiply and divide with a decimal here or there. Now I'm not trying to discount anyone who has difficulty with nursing school or nursing math..like they said, some things are more difficult for some than others. The fact of the matter is, I hear some students who complain that they had to take ANY math or ANY microbiology. Their reasoning is "We're not doctors, why do we need to know about the disease". Those people are in the wrong school if you ask me

And sidenote...real organic is just that, real organic. Having a TEST over some concepts related to organic chemistry is definitely not the same thing. That's just like saying, "we had a test over Cancer, and cancer drugs..so we basically learned a full course worth of cancer and it's medications." And I'm not insulting your school or saying it's wimpy..just saying a test over something doesn't mean it's the same as taking the full course

By comparison to the hard sciences, nursing school is just not that hard. *Real* organic chemistry is the one that ends with the American Chemical Society standardized final and *real* o-chem is nothing compared to physical chemistry and quantitative chemistry. Quant is nothing compared to mechanical vibrations or thermodynamics.

Any science class that doesn't require calculus is 2nd-tier IMO and any class that relies on multiple choice tests... well, those don't even count as 2nd-tier in my book.

Nursing school is much easier than learning to be an actual floor nurse.

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There is a post in the general nursing section where a nurse just posted about a new policy at her work that says the nurses must make the toast for the patients in the morning. Stuff like that right there is why people thing it doesn't take much to be a nurse.

When we come taking their special toast orders doesn't seem like like we must have a lot of education. It's one thing to go in on the AM shift to do your assesment and breakfast just got there and you are helping them set it up while talking to them, it's another to have us play the role of dietary as well as other roles we have to play outside of nursing.

There is nothing wrong with being a custodian or in food services or being aide. But I didn't spend years in college and tons and tons of money so this could be my role.

You mean you didn't major in Toastology?!

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Yes, yes you did cheese them lol

That is a very true statement. SOMETIMES(don't anyone tell me that I said everyone) when people are unhappy, they tend to bend the truth a bit in their favor. I also agree that nursing is easier and less complex than Biology and Chemistry. Yes, nursing school did have some difficult parts to it, but the requirements are still far easier than most other majors. And to anyone who is offended by that statement, go take a test in Organic, Physics II, Bio II, Biochemistry, or any other science class and tell me which is more difficult. The Math problems in those classes take 4-5+ formulas, theories, critical thinking, etc. and put it into ONE math problem that starts on 1 page and finishes on the next with symbols you couldn't even imagine. But dimensional analysis is nothing but multiply and divide with a decimal here or there. Now I'm not trying to discount anyone who has difficulty with nursing school or nursing math..like they said, some things are more difficult for some than others. The fact of the matter is, I hear some students who complain that they had to take ANY math or ANY microbiology. Their reasoning is "We're not doctors, why do we need to know about the disease". Those people are in the wrong school if you ask me

And sidenote...real organic is just that, real organic. Having a TEST over some concepts related to organic chemistry is definitely not the same thing. That's just like saying, "we had a test over Cancer, and cancer drugs..so we basically learned a full course worth of cancer and it's medications." And I'm not insulting your school or saying it's wimpy..just saying a test over something doesn't mean it's the same as taking the full course

I took those classes (previous biochem/pre-med major) and for me, they were harder then nursing school. I took accelerated calculus-based physics and it was a nightmare. Biochemistry was similar to the amount of information required to be crammed in your head in nursing school. Organic was a lot of memorization. Quant was the easist class. For me nursing school is challenging in a different way: just massive amounts of info in very short amounts of time, however that info is not difficult to grasp at all. Sometimes I take my patho tests and feel like I could've passed it without even reading my book -- I look at the questions and go, "really??". My physics and biochem test left me in tears. Both NS and hard sciences are hard but they are different beasts imho.

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Specializes in Emergency Dept. Trauma. Pediatrics.
You mean you didn't major in Toastology?!

No I picked bagelology. :p

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Having a TEST over some concepts related to organic chemistry is definitely not the same thing. That's just like saying, "we had a test over Cancer, and cancer drugs..so we basically learned a full course worth of cancer and it's medications." And I'm not insulting your school or saying it's wimpy..just saying a test over something doesn't mean it's the same as taking the full course

As a former science major, much of the content of nursing school felt pretty "intro-level". The level of explanation in our nursing texts seemed relatively shallow physiologically and pharmacologically compared to other science-for-science-majors coursework I'd taken. However, the bredth of material covered in nursing school was astronomical for the short time frame. To cover everything *is* an incredible (impossible?) challenge!

I felt kind inadequate to take on the nursing role of educating patients when I didn't know much more about many conditions than the 2 pages in the nursing textbook!

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I have honestly never had a person tell me that nursing school was easy. I usually get the opposite response, followed by a "how exactly do you have time for that" kind of statement.

I honestly don't care if people think it's easy, and my patients may never know how much responsibility for their life and well being are in my hands. The point is that I know, and I'll do my job accordingly. ;)

And the satisfaction that brings keeps me going - most jobs that fall under that 'work is never done' catagory are also labeled 'thank-less'. Somehow, a nurse's 'work is never done' but doesn't feel 'thank-less' - very gratifying

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