I have the month of May off from school. I’ve picked a couple of extra shifts at the vet clinic, but essentially I’m lazing around my apartment. Lots of late morning cuddles with my cat, staying out till one with friends, laying in parks reading, cooking healthy meals and grabbing unhealthy meals with friends I haven’t seen in months. I look back at my first semester of nursing school and wonder lazily to myself, “Did I imagine all that?”
It’s a shock to go from something being an all-consuming force in your life to having almost NO presence in your life. At orientation for my program back in January, multiple professors and deans emphasized that the first semester of nursing school is the hardest, the most intense, the one that some students struggle to survive. In just three months, the school strives to give you an entire medical foundation on which to build a nursing practice and reshape the way you approach patients and people in general.
I can honestly say that I’ve never worked harder on anything in my life. The weekend before finals, my classmate/friend Lauren and I camped out at NYU’s Bobst library and studied from about 10am till about 8pm both Saturday and Sunday. I’ve never studied like that for anything in my life. During my original undergrad, you would never find me studying for more than three maybe four hours on a given day, let alone 20 hours in a two day period.
For the last three months, pretty much everything in my life fell by the wayside. My life was school, clinical, and studying. And I loved it. Absolutely loved it. As every week of this grueling semester progressed, I became more and more certain that nursing is what I was born to do, and I am so excited for my career. It’s the perfect profession for me, and NYU was the right school for me to attend. I feel like I have so many stories, experiences, and revelations that I want to share that I’ve had a hard time even starting. It was three intense months that simply cannot be condensed down into five or six paragraphs. Perchance I will find some more time in my following weeks off to talk about some of the big topics that came up in nursing school and some of the major experiences. And if any of my dozen or so readers want to hear about anything in particular or have questions about nursing school, please feel free to let me know!
Until then, all I can say is that nursing school is absolutely fantastic, and I’m hoping if the next couple of semesters are easier, I can return to writing some more about it. But right now, it’s sunny and about 70 degrees outside, so I’m going to grab some books and a blanket and go lounge in Astoria Park and NOT think about diabetes or peripheral vascular diseases, or pressure ulcers.
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