21 year old new grad advice?!

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I take my NCLEX end of December 2016 and am very nervous towards starting my career. Although I would say I am mature and knowledgable for my age (just turned 21 in July) I feel as if this has put me in a position where it will be hard to keep up with more mature nurses. Any advice for a young, soon to be new grad? Thanks :)

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Specializes in Critical Care, Education.

Hi there night owl - just saw the time stamp on your post.

Your transition (from student to practicing nurse) will be much easier if you don't try to compare yourself to experienced nurses. When you achieve the same amount of experience, you'll be just as competent as they are. You'll have a much more useful frame of reference if you use other new grads as a benchmark to assess your progress.

Wishing you the best of luck on launching your career.

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Yes I try not to compare but it's tough not to. Thank you for the words of encouragement, as you can tell it's something that keeps me up at night! Lol

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Specializes in Critical care, Trauma.

Starting off is hard. It just....is. There's no way around it, you have to accept that it's going to suck for a while. It doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong, or that you're a bad nurse or a bad person, it just means that they can't teach you everything you need to know to do every possible nursing job, just from a few years in nursing school. My first job was in primary care. I was an LPN at the time and I started at the same time as a BSN-prepared RN. We had basically the same job description in that setting (I got IV certified within 2 months of starting the job) and we often would just look at the other nurses around us and think "how do you know that?" "how could you possibly remember all of ____?" It was like these more experienced nurses were just magically knowing what needed to happen, anticipating questions the patients would have, and just had all the answers. Eventually you find out that no one has all the answers, but it sure felt like they did at the time. But we absorbed as MUCH as we could from them, everyday, even when we went home crying and overwhelmed. For a while it's going to feel more like a continuation of nursing school than a real job, where you actually know what you are doing. And that's okay.

My recommendations:

1. Always be open to new information

2. Try not to compare yourself to others. And if you must compare, at least don't choose experienced nurses -- you're not going to get anything positive out of that

3. Treat yourself well. Get plenty of sleep, exercise, eat right, do whatever kind of self care keeps you emotionally balanced. It will help your performance, your memory retention, and it will keep you from being as overwhelmed.

Good luck with your graduation and your upcoming NCLEX!

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