I received an e-mail from a friend today that informed me she planned to enrol in nursing school. Knowing her, I think she will enjoy the challenges and diverse employment opportunities the career of nursing presents. Knowing her, also, I'm not sure she'll enjoy nursing school. I didn't.
Needless to say, I sometimes feel guilty when friends of mine decide to go into nursing. I have encouraged at least four friends to leave their previous professions and become nurses via, of course, nursing school. (The friend who recently e-mailed is not among them.) I feel so strongly about the personal and societal benefits of more people being nurses that I don't mind recommending the career to them. However, knowing they have to go through nursing school to get there fills me with a bit of remorse.
It is not that I don't think they'll be able to succeed in nursing school--I have smart friends. It is that I know such a pursuit will aggravate, frustrate, and probably disappoint them. Oh, they'll graduate and come out as nurses, but they'll do a lot in the interim that has little to do with being a nurse. Really.
Like most other associates and bachelors degree programs and most professional-technical education programs, nursing school is very much about busy work and tedious conformity to standards that have little to do with nursing and what nurses actually do. Instead, nursing school is mostly about...well, nursing school. It is about doing the work, making the grade, and passing classes, the ultimate goal of which is to get the degree. In short, a rather underwhelming experience.
One would think nursing school is about learning the professional skills and culture of nursing. That would make sense. But there is a disconnect between what nurses do and the organizations in which they do it and the experience of the nursing student. I don't think this has always been the case, but it is prevalent now.
I went to nursing school later in life, in my 30s, after having already completed a bachelors and masters degree in an unrelated discipline, and having worked in several professional pursuits. I knew how to get through nursing school, and I had enough sense to know that working as a nursing student wasn't going to be like working as a nurse.
But many of my fellow nursing school students were in their late teens, traditional students by college standards. Some of them seemed to chose the nursing program as as just another college major, similar to accounting or English or biology. There did not seem to be anything about their lives that propelled them toward nursing or encouraged them to become nurses. They had gone to college because that is what you do after high school. It was an expectation.
Choosing nursing probably felt good to them and others probably responded to their choice with support and encouragement. But did they know what they were getting into? Did nursing school prepare them for what they would be doing as nurses?
As a nurse, I have likewise had the opportunity to precept nursing students and orient new nurses. I have had nursing students who fainted at the site of blood, got sick to their stomachs because of the smell of feces or vomit, or couldn't handle the look of a surgical site or stand poking a patient with a needle. Wouldn't they have made better accountants? How come they didn't know this?
I've also had students and sometimes new nurses who couldn't reason what amount of medicine to give a patient when the order was for 1 milligram but the medicine vial contained 2 milligrams per milliliter. Clearly they shouldn't have been nurses, or shouldn't have passed nursing school anyway.
When precepting or orienting new nurses I try to communicate a single idea: that being a good nurse is not about doing it the way they told you to do it in nursing school, but to develop your own method and rhythm and style and become the nurse you want to be, not the nurse they tried to cookie cut.
So, I am glad that my friend is going into nursing. I suppose I've written this both as encouragement to her and also a warning. Nursing school is not about being a nurse. Get through it, learn the theory, the methods, and perform the skills the way they tell you to. And then, after graduation, forget it all and become the nurse you want to be.
That's what I did.
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2 comments:
I would far rather I had a degree in nursing (which I don't) than philosophy (which I do).
Heck, I would even take a degree in the dreaded field of accounting. Even if chosen by default, a nursing degree is a far more practical move than *anything* in the humanities.
The truth is that nobody learns ANYTHING in depth in their undergraduate program. (A high-school aged daughter of a friend recently told me she wanted to go to university X because they had a great psychology program -- instead of laughign I suggested that it may only be *great* if you are after a PhD.)
All college graduates have a college degree. But only some of those grads are worth more than ten bucks an hour . . . And I would way rather enjoy a living wage than Kant's metaphysics.
That's a roundabout way of saying I wish I was working as a nurse instead of attending grad school in my program, which is humanities-on-steroids.
I am currently in my last 18 weeks of nursing school and I would just like to say, "bravo!"
I could not agree more. I think nursing school is more of a means to an end if you will. I hear from multiples nurses that it is just something you need to get through and then move on. I was taking a break from studying and came upon your site. I think I will visit often :)
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