As the semester ends...

Well, yesterday marked the end of my pre-nursing career. While I still have finals to go before the semester ends, I have essentially survived the 6 semesters leading up to my finally starting the nursing program. Looking back on my last three and a half years in a strictly academic sense, several things come to mind...None of them positive. Three retaken classes, countless tears, unlimited frustration and a whole lot of anger. So many times in the past few years I have felt hopeless, like I was never even going to get in, let alone succeed as a nurse.

When I first entered Grand Valley's nursing program, I was fearless. I had no idea of the difficulty of the program. I had no knowledge of the number of people who quit before they make it, or quit because they can't make it. I never knew how much a tenth of a point on my GPA would matter, or how I would come to fear the words "Decision" and "Course" when used together to mean "the 6 classes that will determine your success or failure in this program."

I haven't always known that nursing was where I wanted to be. When I first started looking at colleges, I was looking at schools with good psychology programs. One college visit I went on was to Valparaiso University, where prospective students were able to attend small meetings with professors from different majors. I went to the psychology meeting, and the entire time I found myself wondering what I would do with a psychology degree, and no one in the room could give me a good enough answer. I casually mentioned to my mom that maybe we could go to the nursing meeting, just to get some information. Walking out of that meeting, I knew that nursing was where I wanted to be. It was the first time that I had felt truly connected with something, and from then on I joined the minority of college students that stick with one major.

Nursing orientation was a few week ago, and I meant to start the blog shortly after this since it was really the start of my "admitted" nursing school journey. Orientation wasn't entirely what I thought it would be. I thought it would be more of an outline of what to expect in nursing school, but really it was more of a vague discussion on "what to do if the nursing student did this...." It also included instructions on how to park at the CHS building (in case we didn't figure it out in three years), not to feed the homeless people (as if that wasn't common sense), and to not walk around alone at night (again, obvious). In other news, before you go to orientation, you should read the information telling you what to bring to orientation. I walked in with exactly none of the things that I was supposed to bring with me. My lack of medical records was a pain that day and is still a pain three weeks later. I was CPR certified, but by the Red Cross and the nursing program only accepts American Heart Association. H1N1, seasonal flu, vaccine titers, more vaccines, the list of crap never ends. I will be so thankful when that part of this adventure is over. But the positive part of orientation was the we got to buy our blood pressure cuffs and stethoscopes, and order our uniforms, which I brought home and played with for about an hour.

I'm ready to start actually learning things. Things that will actually be relevant to my career. I know that there is still going to be a lot of crap that I have to deal with, a lot of frustration, and a lot of tears ahead of me. But as least this crap and frustration will be leading towards my goal of becoming a nurse. I'm not sure what this journey is going to be like, but i know that it will be just that, a journey. Anyone who wants to go on it with me can read this as I go :)