15 things every nursing student needs to know

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Nursing school is, as you well know, no joke. The hours are long, the studying never ends and the material is serious business. Not many of your friends will literally have “life or death” jobs. Were you prepared going in?

Brittney at The Nerdy Nurse says that when she went into nursing school, she didn’t know many actual nurses. Having little advice to go on, she set out believing that nursing school doesn’t have to be a terrible experience – and it wasn’t! (For the most part.)

In an effort to pay her experience forward, she recently posted a lengthy article on the finer points of hitting the books and making it out alive. Here are 5 things she thinks every nursing student needs to know:

1. Nursing is nothing like you think it will be.

Even if your life is filled with nurses and you think you know exactly what you will encounter when you hit the floor, you will soon find that you know nothing. I could give you a hundred examples, but you won’t get it until you’ve been there. There are so many facets of nursing that you just can’t understand until you have lived it. Don’t feel bad about it; just see it as an opportunity grow and learn.

2. You don’t need nearly as many books as is on your syllabus.

Although many may not agree with me on this, in my humble opinion, that $1000 in text books per semester is outrageous and unneeded. Most of the information you need will be delivered in class and you might only look at the books for a sentence or two. I suggest finding out who your instructors are and asking them if you really need four books for the 2-credit class you are taking. If you can’t reduce the amount of books you need to buy, then you should partner with a friend and each buy half the books, then share. If you’re working together as study buddies then you won’t miss the books that you didn’t purchase. Also, you should buy your nursing textbooks online from somewhere like Amazon. Most of the time you get free 2-day shipping and it’s usually much cheaper than the college bookstore.

3. You probably won’t keep your 4.0.

If you’re a perfectionist, then you are among your people. Many nurses have Type A personalities and strive for their best. This often includes making good grades. But alas, dear nursling, you might not be able to maintain that immaculate 4.0 you’ve had throughout the rest of your college experience. Nursing school is a different brand of difficult and incredibly smart young men and women find it very difficult to maintain the same grade point average they had going in. You might make a B or two. Heck you might even make a few Cs. That’s ok. As you will find out soon enough, what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. And I haven’t met a nurse yet who was asked for his or her transcripts when applying for a job.

4. Study groups will help you keep your sanity.

On the very first day of nursing school our teachers highly recommended that we find people to carpool with and study with. While I didn’t take them up on this suggestion initially, I really wish I had. It wasn’t until my second year in nursing school that I found a group of friends to study with and it really was a huge life saver. I would have done so much better the first year if I had just done this in this first place.

5. Every answer is correct. Your job is to know what is “most” correct.

One of the most difficult things for nursing students to grasp is how to answer NCLEX-style test questions. What nursing school is really all about is teaching you how to critically think. This means that the answers aren’t always on the surface and you really have to know how to think about the bigger picture to know what answer is correct. In nursing there are many ways you can take care of patients and perform the same task, but there are methods that work best. Nursing school is meant to try and teach you this skill. One of the best things you can do for yourself is find yourself an NCLEX strategy guide (I used Saunders Strategies for Test Success: Passing Nursing School and the NCLEX Exam) and study it before you even start nursing school. This will help you retrain your brain to answers the types of questions that will appear on tests in nursing school and the NCLEX and will really give you an edge in school.