Nursing marathon: Day One

After this god awful day, the last thing I feel like doing is writing in my blog about it, but I figure I will only have one first day of Nursing 320/321 so I should probably write about it. To clear up what I mean by god awful & nursing marathon is this: 12 hours of nursing classes, overwhelming stress and confusion, and the general feeling that I just want to cry.

My day started out with Nursing 320, which is our first theory class. All 64 people in my class have this one together, so I love that I get to see all my lab 101 favorite people at least once a week. It's taught by 5 different professors, with each one teaching certain lectures and making up separate sections of our exams. So in case getting used to one professors teaching style isn't hard enough, let's have 5 professors to get used to. So fine. Theory is from 8:30-11:50. The next thing we have is lab. We have lab 4 days a week for the first 4 weeks of the semester. Then we stop having lab and have 4 weeks of OB clinical and 4 weeks of primary care clinical, which isn't confusing at all right? So lab is from 12-2:50. I have 4 other people from last semester in my lab this year, which is going to be nice. In lab this semester we will learn medical calculations, passing meds, sterile technique and injections, along with a few other things. We then get a WHOPPING 40 minute break until we head to seminar from 3:30-5:20. Our seminar was ridiculous. Our professor had NO idea what was going on, knew nothing about our program and just honestly had no clue. It was so frustrating after our insanely long day. My last class today was Nursing Research, which is an online class so luckily we only meet twice all semester. So I had that tonight from 6-8:15. Holy Jesus.

The worst part about this semester is that the Blackboard site is AWFUL. It's so much information, just thrown into folders all over the place and it takes forever to navigate and figure out what is happening. After several hours of printing and organizing today I am starting to feel like I am getting a grasp on all of the sections and how to organize them. So that is making me feel a little better and a little more in control. Please take note of the picture of my binder. This literally has taken me the ENTIRE DAY to organize. As in I started it yesterday and finished it about a half hour ago. It has EASILY over 100 pages already printed in it.

320/321 is the semester that I have been being warned about since LONG before I even got into the nursing program. Everyone says that this is the hardest semester of the program and that getting through it is hell. I know going into this semester that it is going to be insanely hard, but i'm hoping that if I stay on top of everything and plan ahead I can survive without pulling my hair out. I'm hoping that I will be able to look back on this semester and think "Well that sucked, but I made it though." I think optimism and organization are going to be the key points in this semester. Ugh. We can do this.