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 […]

2016-11-21T13:13:19-05:00May 4th, 2011|career, students|19 Comments
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Nursing and Women’s Basketball Go Back a Long Way

Nursing Student Basketball Team, Grace Hospital, Detroit, 1924

By Maureen ‘Shawn’ Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

I’m a big college basketball fan (to me, professional teams seem less about the team and more about the players). When I was growing up in the city, playground basketball was the only sport that was accessible on a daily basis. (OK, there was a ping-pong table, but that just didn’t seem as exciting.) I learned to play the game there, and then played in high school and for one year in college as a freshman. After that, nursing classes and a part-time job interfered. More recently, I coached grammar school and middle school girls teams (one of the funnest things I’ve done!).

I love that the women’s NCAA college basketball tournament has received more and more coverage each year. A few years ago, one was hard-pressed to find out when the games were being televised. Now, they’re enjoying prime time, if not a prime channel. (Women’s games—and tonight’s championship game between Notre Dame and Texas A&M—are usually broadcast on cable, on ESPN.)

So here’s some trivia: many people may not know that most nursing schools had basketball teams in their early days—as far back as the 1920s. It’s always been interesting to me that, despite the oppressive and convent-like restrictions placed on nursing students, these young women could play basketball! There were leagues among schools—the AJN archives has articles and photos of early teams (the photo above shows the team […]

2016-11-21T13:13:36-05:00April 5th, 2011|Nursing|0 Comments
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‘At the Night Camp’: How Assumptions About Patients Can Blind Us

The entire time he was with us he kept looking around, eyes darting back and forth and toward the truck he’d driven, which he told me wasn’t his own. He shifted uneasily in his chair, and I felt the impulse to try to comfort him and tell him we could help.

That’s an excerpt from “At the Night Camp,” the December Reflections essay in AJN. The essay, by Meg Sniderman, a student in the MSN program at Emory University School of Nursing in Atlanta, takes a wry, honest look at the ways we can imagine whole lives for those around us based on their cultural identifiers, yet often miss the most obvious things about these patients . . . the things that make them just like us, despite apparently vast cultural differences.—JM, senior editor/blog editor

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2016-11-21T13:14:39-05:00December 17th, 2010|nursing perspective, patient engagement, Public health, students|0 Comments
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A Nurse Cartoonist Worth Checking Out

Drawing on Experience is a blog run by a student who’s been completing an accelerated BSN program in nursing and who illustrates his education and personal life with remarkably subtle and witty cartoons. Hat tip to a recent Change of Shift blog roundup at Emergiblog for letting us know about his work. It would be wrong to reproduce this artist’s work here without permission, and he might not like it, so I’m just including a really really tiny version of a recent cartoon illustrating his induction into the nursing honor society. It links back to his original Web site, where you can see this and many other cartoons in full, legible size (and of course, upon request, we’ll gladly remove the thumbnail image here!).

What makes this artist’s work so much fun? The tongue-in-cheek, martial-arts-disciple-and-wise-man narrative? The humility and sense of pleasure in life’s ironies and challenges? The quality of line? The attention to apparently trivial details? The way his mini-narratives play with genre conventions? At any rate, it’s a welcome addition to the nursosphere; I don’t see any contact info on this artist’s blog, but we hope he’ll find time to continue (and consider letting us publish one of his drawings on the blog or in AJN).—JM, senior editor/blog editor

2016-11-21T13:15:41-05:00September 17th, 2010|career, nursing perspective, students|1 Comment
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Prospects for New Nurses: Thoughts on Graduating during a Downturn

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

Impending graduation is usually a happy, exciting time, especially for those who, after putting in years of hard work,  are finally about to get that college degree. In the mid-1990s I was in what I considered to be a pretty tough nursing program. For example, during my second semester of core classes we went from 30 students to 19; the drop-off was due to students failing out. Graduation couldn’t come fast enough.

However, when you find out that people who graduated one and two semesters before you are still looking for work, it can be a real buzz kill. That’s how it was for me in May 1995. During that time several hospitals were going through restructuring or reengineering (as this AJN article reported) and were replacing RNs with UAPs. It was next to impossible for a nurse without at least a year of recent experience to find a job in a hospital. Now, as a result of the recession, new graduates are  facing a similar situation. It took me almost a year to get my first job—and this was not without some sacrifices:  I had to relocate from New York to Miami and work the 12-hour night shift.

It ended up being worthwhile, but it was one of the hardest years of my life and potentially could have turned me off of nursing forever. Has anyone else out there had a similar experience? What […]

2016-11-21T13:17:36-05:00May 21st, 2010|nursing perspective|9 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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