Nursing school is an extremely difficult yet rewarding educational experience. Before beginning nursing school, prospective students hear about how difficult it will be. However, students don't realize just how much time and energy it takes to succeed until they start nursing school themselves. Throughout the difficulty, excitement, stress, and hard work, nursing students progressively discover just how fulfilling the nursing profession is, making every anxiety-riddled minute worth it. Here are the 10 stages every first semester nursing student experiences:
Stage 1: Excitement
You’ve been accepted into nursing school! This is an extremely valuable accomplishment, and you’re so proud of yourself for making it this far. You call all of your family and friends and tell them the good news, and they congratulate you and inform you that they’ll be coming to you with any health questions they may have. Although you don’t really want them to do that, you’re too happy to care at this point.
Stage 2: Anticipation
You’ll be starting your first day of nursing school in just a few weeks. You make sure you’ve placed the order for your scrubs and supplies, and you’ve found all of your textbooks at a semi-discounted price. You pick out your stethoscope in your favorite color, and convince yourself that the $90 Littmann is totally worth it. You then take your stethoscope home and attempt to listen to heart and lung sounds on yourself and your family members, but realize you actually have no idea where you should be listening to and can’t hear a thing. You decide to put the stethoscope away until you’ve actually been taught how to auscultate properly, and anxiously await the start of classes. Orientation makes you even more excited, and you absolutely cannot wait to begin your nursing career.
Stage 3: Panic
Classes have started, and your excitement goes from a 10 to a 0 very quickly. Sure, you’re still excited to learn how to be an awesome nurse, but when you realize all the effort that you’ll have to put forth over the next three years, you have a mini panic attack (or 12). It’s only the first day of classes and you’ve been assigned 10 chapters of reading, PowerPoints to study, and you’ve also been informed that you’ll have a skill check in one week on a skill you have yet to learn. The first day alone is so much to take in, and you wonder if you can make it through a whole semester at this intensity. You instantly become stressed and want to give up before you even start.
Stage 4: Determination
You decide that no matter how hard you have to work in nursing school, you will make it through. There’s no amount of work that can make you give up your dream job. You’ve been accepted into the program already, and you refuse to lose your spot under any circumstances. You know it won’t be easy by any means, but if it were easy, everyone would do it. You remind yourself that part of the merit of a nursing career lies in the difficulty of the required education. So you whip out the highlighters, index cards, and laptop and bury yourself in assignments and studying. You have no time for human interaction, sleep, or going out on weekends. You just feel like you can’t lose out on all that valuable study time, because if you neglect your responsibilities for even a few hours, you’ll fall so far behind. You apologize to your family and friends for not being able to spend time with them, but you’re actually not that sorry. You miss them and their company, but you won’t let anyone make you feel guilty for following your dreams. Nothing and nobody will hold you from your success as a student and your future success as a nurse.
Stage 5: Disappointment
You’ve studied your ass off for weeks and the library has become your second home. You’ve gone through the study guides, PowerPoints, and textbooks more times than you can count. You haven’t spoken to your friends in weeks because you’ve been too busy studying. You do everything right, but when you get your test grade back you realize that you’ve gotten an 80 percent, which is only a C+ in nursing school. You wonder how it’s possible to have studied like a 4.0 student and receive a C. Your grade makes you feel defeated, and you wonder why you bother trying so hard if it's going to get you mediocre grades.
Stage 6: Acceptance
You begin to realize that nobody is perfect, especially not in nursing school. Nobody is going to get As on every test, no matter how smart they are or how much they study. A few slip-ups are okay to have here and there as long as you pass. Passing is all you care about at this point, and any grades above passing are just an added bonus to you. You know that no hospital is going to refuse to hire you just because you graduated with a 3.2 instead of a 4.0, so you're willing to accept a few Bs and Cs.
Stage 7: Stress
You’ve accepted that you don’t need a perfect GPA and you ultimately just want to pass, but you still want to keep trying your hardest for As. So you re-bury yourself in your studies, and hope that this time it pays off more. You change up your study habits to suit your learning needs. You study for as long as you need to, and tell yourself that all the stress is worth it if it pays off in the end.
Stage 8: Satisfaction
Even though you’re completely stressed out all the time, you begin to do better. Even if you’re not doing much better than you were doing before, you’re showing slight improvement. You feel like you’re finally getting the hang of this whole nursing school thing. You’ve begun your clinical rotations, and although that adds more work for you, you’re happy to be in a hospital with real patients. You get to practice all the skills you’ve practiced on dummies and classmates, except this time it is on people with actual health problems. You’re reminded of how much you love taking care of people, even if you’re not doing anything more than vital signs, bed baths, and quick assessments. You’re completely satisfied with your career choice and couldn’t imagine yourself doing anything else. All the trouble you’ve gone through up to this point and all the stress you’ll face in the future is worthwhile if you get to be a nurse for the rest of your life.
Stage 9: Procrastination
You’ve almost made it through a whole semester of nursing school! You’re so excited to get a break from the work you’ve been going through for 16 weeks. As much as you love learning about your future career, you’re done with working so hard. It’s getting really old spending your weekends doing homework, and you’re ready to get back to your normal life before you started nursing school. You realize that you don’t have much to do until finals begin, so you put off studying for as long as possible.
Stage 10: Pressure
Your procrastination comes to bite you in the ass when you have three or more consecutive finals that are a few days away. You crack down and get your studying done in the short time that you have and hope for the best. You have a whole week filled with intense pressure to do well, because a bad grade on a final can override all the good grades you’ve worked so hard to achieve. Grab some coffee, highlighters, and your laptop, because you’re not done just yet. Once you get through the final stretch, you have five more semesters of stress, but you know you’ve got what it takes to make it through–you wouldn’t have made it this far if you didn’t.
