When I decided to go to an engineering school for nursing, I didn’t think about how polar opposite each major is. As I go through in detail in this article, this is the daily life of a nursing student at an engineering based school.

The first difference I noticed right away was the difference in personalities. Naturally, as nurses, we are very eccentric, extroverted people that love to talk and get to know others. This almost needs to be natural for us because we get to know different patients and doctors every day during work. I am the type of person that always says hi to everyone, try to make conversation or at least say thank you to someone that holds the door/elevator open for me. My day is usually accompanied by awkward elevator rides and little conversation, (no thank you) or no eye contact what-so-ever. If I were to ride the elevator with a nurse, usually there is talk about clinical, different exams, the latest diet cleanse or talking about what we are going to do during the weekend when said tests/clinicals are done.

Nurses are always talking about clinicals, nutrition, medications or any of the gross aspects that we see out in clinical. To us as nurses, this is our senior design, our MatLab, our Solid Works. I am in a setting where I constantly hear about lab notebooks, circuits homework, or weird physics and calculus equations that are foreign to me. In the bustle of the 3^rd floor of the Campus Center Building, I am surrounding by the sounds of these equations as I search for my people that talk about pharmacology and pathophysiology.

Engineering labs can get up to a max of four to maybe five hours in one sitting. For nurses, our clinicals are our lab days and we can be at a clinical site from anywhere from 6 to 12 hours. Yes, 12 hours! A full shift! When I hear that labs are “long” for them, I can only think back on to when I had to be at the nursing home from 6:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Now that is a long time in one sitting.

The difference I really like to highlight is the classroom demographic. Boy engineers usually state that there are all about five girls in their class (give or take a few girls) and vice versa for the girls; that they are only one of about five girls. For me, there is only one guy in our nursing classes. Boy engineers are amazed by this ratio because they have the exact opposite in their classes.

I go through my day with all of these daily “struggles” so call it. However, the one aspect we have in common is the difficulty of our majors. All of us barely sleep focusing on getting the task done at hand. We are all smart and driven individuals striving to achieve to graduation. I embrace these difference every day and would not change where I went to school for the world. Engineers and nurses may be incredibly different, but we are also very similar in the end.