What Advice Would You Give a New Nursing Student? Our Readers Respond…

KarenRoushBy Karen Roush, MSN, RN, FNP-C, AJN clinical managing editor

My daughter Kim is starting nursing school next month, so last week I asked AJN’s Facebook followers for the best piece of advice I could give her. The response was overwhelming: over 600 people offered wisdom, encouragement, and tips for success. I went through and read them all and the following is an attempt to synthesize the advice.

Of course, with so many responses, there were many valuable pieces of advice I had to leave out, from the practical to the profound, such as:

sit in the front of class, stick to your principles, invest in good shoes, choose clinicals that push you out of your comfort zone, be early for everything, celebrate the small victories, get a really good stethoscope up front, believe in yourself, pick the hardest patient you can at clinical, audiorecord the lectures, be truthful and committed to your work, eat healthy, get to know your instructors, coffee and chocolate!

And finally: look into the eyes of your patients and be sure they know you care. Every patient, every time.

(Oh, and not to leave out the lighthearted—Don’t hold your nose in clinicals. The teachers frown on that.)

Below are five areas of advice that stood out:

1) “Take a […]

2016-11-21T13:05:03-05:00April 9th, 2014|career, healthcare social media, nursing perspective, students|7 Comments
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Don’t Write Off Community College to Start a Nursing Career

By Karen Roush, MSN, RN, FNP-C, AJN clinical managing editor

KarenRoushMy daughter is about to start her nursing career. She’s got all her prereqs out of the way and she’s waiting to hear from the half-dozen colleges she applied to. Among them is the community college where I started my career 35 years ago. That’s right—a community college that confers an associate degree.

I hope she gets in.

Community colleges are seen by many as the bottom of the ladder of desired schools of nursing. Not only do they offer only a two-year degree, but they’re not seen as being as selective as four-year colleges and they don’t have the big name professors.

But community colleges can and do produce great nurses. Programs are rigorous, so a more liberal admission standard at the onset doesn’t necessarily change the caliber of student who graduates at the end. And once they graduate, they must meet the same standards as students from four-year schools to attain licensure as an RN—everyone takes the same NCLEX. At the time of my graduation, my school had a 98% pass rate, one of the highest in the country.

Community colleges even have some advantages over a lot of four-year programs. They may not have the big names—but really, how many of those big name […]

2016-11-21T13:05:07-05:00March 26th, 2014|career, nursing perspective, students|12 Comments
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Future Nurses—No Shrinking Violets

Thelma Schorr and Kathryn Brownfield. Thelma Schorr and Kathryn Brownfield

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Last week I had the opportunity to meet several members of the National Student Nurses Association (NSNA) board of directors when they were here in New York for a board meeting. As is custom, NSNA chief executive officer Diane Mancino invites many of the NSNA sponsors and supporters to dinner to meet the new board.

I had the pleasure of meeting Kathryn Brownfield, the nursing student editor of Imprint, the NSNA’s official publication. She’s a nursing student at Nash Community College in North Carolina. We sat with Thelma Schorr, AJN’s former editor and publisher (and a consulting editor at Imprint) and Florence Huey, a former editor of AJN and of Geriatric Nursing (and a former president of the NSNA). It was like homecoming!

I was impressed—as I always seem to be—with these aspiring nurses. Many of them are second-degree students and come into nursing with work experience, a family, and a maturity that was lacking in my cohort, which was largely younger, right out of high school, with little work experience.

I wonder how these nursing students will fare in their first nursing jobs. One hears a lot about bullying and lateral violence and how it’s driving some new nurses away. I can’t imagine any of the students I met being cowed by overbearing coworkers.

In November, NSNA will host its mid-year conference, which typically draws 1,500 attendees; this year, it will […]

2016-11-21T13:07:11-05:00June 24th, 2013|career, nursing perspective, students|2 Comments
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Watch a Student Nurse in the UK Give a Voice to Nurses Everywhere

This is really pretty wonderful: a video showing a student nurse, Molly Case, addressing the Royal College of Nursing 2013 Congress with an eloquent poem that is the best response possible to the criticisms recently leveled at England’s National Health Service. Please take a minute and watch it. It’s worth it.

2016-11-21T13:07:40-05:00May 6th, 2013|students|3 Comments
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Finding Future Leaders – and a NICHE in Nursing

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

It has been a hectic few weeks, as I’ve been traveling to the early spring nursing meetings (with still more to come).

With John Gransbach at NSNA meeting With John Gransbach at NSNA meeting

First I went to Charlotte, North Carolina, to attend the National Student Nurses Association (NSNA) annual meeting (April 3–7). AJN has had a long association with the NSNA, supporting it in various ways since its 1952 founding, from hosting board meetings at AJN offices to producing the convention newsletter to convention scholarships for key contributors. In recent years, we’ve sponsored travel expenses to the annual meeting for the winner of Project InTouch, the member incentive plan. This year, the winner was John Gransbach, who graduated from the Goldfarb School of Nursing at Barnes-Jewish College in St Louis. He recruited 228 new NSNA members—an achievement certainly worth recognizing.

Future leaders. As I told the audience when I presented the plaque to Mr. Gransbach, this award isn’t just about growing membership in the NSNA—it’s about contributing to the future of the profession. Students who join the NSNA are already demonstrating a commitment to nursing by going beyond what’s required of them. They’ve joined an organization that provides considerable resources to help them begin their careers. Not only does it provide practical help with passing the NCLEX exam, writing a resume, and finding a job, but it informs them about what it means to be […]

2018-03-28T10:34:13-04:00April 15th, 2013|nursing perspective, students|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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