Rapid Head to Toe Assessment Song

This should song should come in handy one day.

Evolve | Rapid Head to Toe Assessment Song.

6 reasons why Nursing school is hard?

While looking up different aspects about what nursing school would be like, I kept running into the same statement. “Nursing is school is hard?” Now, I’m not certain if this is just from freshly graduated high school kids who never had to learn so many courses at once or whether it was from second degree students who were out of school for a while. But, here is what I’ve gathered so far, nursing school is hard because:-

1. Lots of chapters for one test. Example, 26 chapters for the first test.
Now I can see this being a total shock for students but I’d also like to think that they’re not actually reading every single word in all these chapters.

2. Lots of papers
Back when I was studying Psychology, this was my preferred method for grading because I could explain in writing better than on the despised multiple choice tests. Although, I do get the idea that nursing school is also supposed to help you pass the NCLEX, I still don’t care for multiple choice tests.

3. Getting up early.
This one is going to be a problem for me if I don’t change my habit of going to bed at midnight or 1am. Hopefully, I will get it done but I can see why students would be bothered by this. In order to get 8 full hours of sleep, I would have to go to bed at 9pm or 10pm to get up at 5am or 6am. This method may work if you’re single but if you have children and the only time to study is after they go to bed, then there might be a problem.

4. Doing tasks never done before and being graded on it.
Now, I would like to think that faculty are usually aware of this but I firmly believe that once you have been doing something for a long time you tend to forget that it’s new to the person you are teaching. There used to be a saying at my old job that when teaching someone some new task, the most important thing was usually left out. Which always led to the “oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you” line.

5. Keeping grades above 80%
This right here is an added stress that would drive most people nuts. Just the mere thought of it would keep me awake at night. Not to mention the waiting and waiting for test results. I think some professors in general don’t realize that waiting for test results is excruciating.

6. Lots of tests.
This is probably inevitable especially if you’re attending an accelerated program. There is just no way around it. But, with good test taking skills it should be slightly easier.

And, there you have it. This list was compiled from various sources a while ago because I was getting tired of hearing the same thing over and over about nursing school being hard. Hopefully, I can be prepared for all of it in the next few months. If you have anything to add, let me know.

Hospitals Begin to Require BSNs

Hospitals forcing nurses to have BSN’s. It’s along heated debate and it seems that it will continue for a long time. The AD nurses claim they have more clinical experience and snub the BSN nurses who apparently only write research papers. It would be great if people would stop thinking that everything is so black and white, this or that and learn to appreciate both routes. It should be interesting to see how this all pans out.

 

Hospitals Begin to Require BSNs, Aren’t Waiting on BSN in 10 Legislation | National Nursing News.

8 Post Finals Tips

So, my class is finally over. I think my professor tried to scare us with the first couple of questions because they were very wordy and needed lots of thinking. But, the rest of it was a total breeze. Based on the different studying methods I tried in this class, I have noted a few things that worked for me and things that went completely out the window. Here they are:-

1. Visual thinking – I am a person that needs to see things to understand it. Youtube was so helpful to me when I could find what I wanted. The internet on a whole was helpful seeing that I never bought the textbook for the class. Looking back, I don’t know if that was a good idea seeing that it was a science course but when you have to spend hundreds on a book and the professor only uses slides for every class then you really have to make a decision on whether it’s worthwhile.

2. Repetition - going over information only works up to a point. It worked for smaller pieces of information but when you have a lot of information, it wasn’t as helpful. It was great being able to say, ok, I know that because I’ve been seeing it over and over everyday but after a while it fades to the background once you move on.

3. Mnemonics - For some reason I used this a lot without a second thought. I would see a list and automatically look at the beginning letters and come up with something silly. For example, the classification levels had beginning letters, KDSCOFGSS. I turned it into words like Kids, Cough(the gh being the ‘F’ sound), Gross. So when we were asked which one was higher I would just say the words to remember.

4. Diagramming/Drawing - I was a bit skeptical to use this method for fear that it wouldn’t work but it turns out that because I’m so visual that I sometimes remembered where the information was on the page, so I started writing different sections in different corners to help jog my memory. The only issue with this, was that it took a lot of time and trying to put it in color was even more arduous and pencil just didn’t cut it. All in all, it did help especially a few days before the test where I condensed every set of slides into one page. I think I just needed a different pen, the multi-colored pen I used was not the best in terms of decent flowing ink.

5. Question Guessing - This was the most difficult for me, I just could not come up with decent questions. They all seemed to come out the same way, with the beginning as ‘what was’ or ‘what is’…very boring. I wish there was a program that could help students come up with ways to create questions for exams. Once I had the professor’s actual exam back to review, a lot of the information was easier to grasp since I could see where my gaps were in learning the information.

6. Flash cards - I went to http://www.flashcardexchange.com but I didn’t have the time and didn’t want to use someone else’s since some had too much info. while some had too little pertaining to my class. I know one of my other classmates used homemade flashcards a lot and she seemed to do well.

7. Whole picture thinking - To me this was the most helpful thing in this class. The professor who probably assumed that we were all diligently reading texts never bothered to give us the big picture. Upon entering the class he would open up his slides and just start talking about it. This made it all the more difficult because I had to go home and try to figure out where the pieces all fit together. I really should have gone in for an office visit but time was of the essence for me.

8. Relating information - This method was important because it helped the information really stick. For example, to remember IgE and the release of Histamines, I used my son who has allergies and whose middle initial has an ‘E’ in it. I probably won’t ever forget that bit of information.

For test questions, I needed to remember to pay attention to key words in my slides. In many of the test questions there were words that should have been very obvious to me when trying to figure out the answer. I sometimes tend to read too fast which hinders me during exams. It’s an issue that I really need to work on in the future.

If you have any other helpful bits of learning/studying ideas, feel free to leave a comment.

Update – using these methods resulted in an A in this class.