May 2011 - Page 4 of 4 - Off the Charts

Notes of a Student Nurse: A Dose of Reality

By Jennifer-Clare Williams, who is a student at Cox College of Nursing and Health Sciences in Springfield, Missouri. This is her first post for this blog.

It’s been said before that we are our own worst enemies, our own worst critics. I can’t imagine a time when these phrases are truer than during nursing school. Little more than a year ago, when I was starting my prerequisites for admission to the BSN nursing program, I was giddy with excitement. Images of what life would be like played in my head like episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, or, on a day I was feeling a bit more goofy, reruns of Scrubs.

I took any opportunity I had to share with friends, family—even new apartment neighbors—that I was well on my way to nursing school with the confident smile of a person destined to save the world, one patient at a time. I scoured discussion boards and nursing student forums late into the night, anticipating the day that I, too, would have something profound to contribute.

I laughed off those who warned me that the path was difficult and ridden with challenges. There was no bridge I couldn’t cross, no task I couldn’t do, and no test I couldn’t pass with flying […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:13:19-05:00May 4th, 2011|career, students|19 Comments

On the Road to the International Council of Nurses Conference in Malta

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

So I’m on my way to Valletta, Malta (Malta is a small Southern European country in the Mediterranean Sea between Sicily and North Africa and a five-hour ferry ride from Libya) for the International Council of Nurses (ICN) meeting. Since there’s no direct flight from my usual airport (Newark, New Jersey) to Malta, it was a no-brainer to go through Paris (April, Paris?) and stop there for a few days. I hadn’t been to Paris before—it was everything I thought it would be, and more. And its reputation as the “City of Light” is well deserved (see the photo of the Eiffel Tower at night, courtesy of my husband).

This will be my third ICN meeting—I attended the centennial meeting in London, and then one a few years later in Copenhagen. It’s amazing to meet nurses from all over the world, many of whom are grappling with issues similar to those confronting us.

Many, though, are dealing with issues far worse than our own. For example, nurses from sub-Saharan Africa face enormous odds in the face of internal conflicts as well as HIV and AIDS, and nurses in Japan have recently dealt with a series of disasters. These nurses amaze me.

And then there are colleagues who seem to be on the same […]