Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links, I make a commission if you use any of the affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.
How To Prepare For Nursing School
Preparing for nursing school is much like preparing for a newborn baby- you can prepare all you want, read all the “how-to” books, and spend countless hours on Internet forums, but you’ll never truly be 100% prepared. That being said, I hope the content of this post will help you get prepared for your upcoming nursing school journey!
Here’s a look at what we are going to be exploring:
- Have “the talk” with your family
- Perfect your note taking skills
- Get organized
- Spend quality time with friends and family
- Seek out nursing role models on social media
- Learn how to take vital signs
Have “the talk” with your family
No, not that talk. The “I am going to be almost non-existent in this household for the next two years” talk.
Nursing school is a huge time commitment, so it will drastically change the dynamics of your life, and more specifically, your household. Family and friends can make or break you during this transition.
Everyone has a different family situation, so there is not a one size fits all solution. However, each nursing student should open up a conversation with their family about the changes that are to come.
If you are typically the one in the house who cooks and cleans, you will likely have to rely more on other members of your family to help complete these tasks.
If you have children, it is important to make your expectations of their involvement in household chores very clear.
If you have a partner or spouse, talk with them about a fair way to divide up tasks like cooking, cleaning, and running errands.
It’s also important that your family is aware that you will not be as available to spend quality time with them everyday (or even every week). This can be difficult for young children to understand, so it is imperative to be patient and to be mindful of their feelings.
Opening up this line of communication early on can help mitigate problems that could develop down the road.
Perfect your note taking skills
It is likely you took a fair amount of notes during your prerequisite courses, so there is a good possibility you already have good note taking skills. However, there is a lot of information in nursing school so even veteran students struggle with taking good notes.
The first piece of advice I have for taking notes is to hand write notes while reading your textbook material. This is helpful for a couple of reasons.
First, you are going to be more engaged in the material you are reading if you are actively taking notes. This is more desirable than re-reading the same paragraph 5 times because you are getting lost in your thoughts.
Second, you are more likely to retain information if you write it down. There are many studies and articles that suggest that writing down information increases the retention of that material. We’re all about retention in nursing school!
It’s important to take note of the “need to know” information and focus less on the information that is not pivotal.
Please, for the love of all things nursing, do not write down every single word on every single PowerPoint slide while you are in lecture. This is not an effective note taking strategy.
Again, take note of the “need to know” information. Pay close attention to the instructor’s inflection to decipher what information they are trying to emphasize.
Also, keep your notes as organized as possible. I touched briefly on what I call “master notes” in How to Pass Nursing School Exams. This is basically a condensed version of the notes you have taken while reading your textbook material and the notes you took during lecture. I would recommend typing up these notes and organizing them in a way that makes sense to you.
Get organized
For a very unorganized person, I preach a lot about organization!
Jokes aside, organization is very important while in nursing school. There are a few ways you can make your life more organized while waiting for your first semester of nursing school to start.
The first thing you can do is do a deep clean of your living space. We’re talking Marie Kondo style. Purge your space of any extra clutter. Sell or donate items that you no longer need or use. This will help you enter nursing school with a clutter-free space and will hopefully make it easier to keep clean over time.
If you have an office space that you will be doing your studying in, take some time to clean it up and get it organized. You can get some items like these to help you stay organized.
It also would be helpful to organize a list of meals that you and your family enjoy. This menu of sorts can help lessen the stress of figuring out what to eat every evening for dinner.
If you have room in your freezer you could also put together freezer meals the month before you start school. Freezer meals are a huge time saver!
This final organizational tip probably goes without saying but get yourself some fun organizational supplies! Buy a calendar, planner, color coded binders and folders, highlighters, sticky notes, and whatever else will help you stay organized.
There are some cute nursing school planners over on Etsy that are almost too cute to use.
Spend quality time with family and friends
As I previously mentioned, nursing school is a huge time commitment and our relationships with our loved ones often suffer.
It is for that reason that you should spend as much time as you can with your family and friends before you start nursing school. It doesn’t particularly matter what y’all do…just enjoy each other’s company.
On a similar note, you should also take the time to partake in hobbies and activities that you enjoy.
Seek out nursing role models on social media
There has been an explosion of nursing “influencers” on the internet as of late, so this should not be a difficult task!
It is a great idea to find some nursing content through blogs, Youtube, Instagram, and Pinterest.
You can check out my personal recommendations for nursing blogs to follow, but there are so many more awesome nurses out there that are providing high quality nursing content on the internet.
It can be helpful to have these individuals on your social media so that you have inspiration to keep you going when things get rough.
You might even consider creating an Instagram profile that is just for nursing. You could post your own nursing material if you like, or just use it to follow a variety of nursing profiles.
It would be perfect to have a mix of educational content and inspirational/motivational content on your feed.
Just make sure you don’t spend more time on social media than you do studying once you are in nursing school.
Learn how to take vital signs
So this tip is quite different than the others in this post. This is certainly not something you HAVE to do before starting school, but it is something I would highly recommend you consider.
As a nursing student and as a working nurse you will take a lot of vital signs. One might say it plays a vital role in your nursing career. Heh heh heh…
Most students who enter nursing school do not know how to take vital signs. That is absolutely okay as your instructors will teach you how to perform this task. However, I would have LOVED to enter nursing school already knowing how to take vital signs.
This is one of those skills that is inherently simple but can become overwhelming when you pile on the other stressors of being a first semester nursing student. Save yourself the stress and get a head of the game. Check out this video to get started learning about vital signs.
If you get can get your hands on a syphgo….spyhgamo…sphygmomanometer and stethoscope you can practice taking blood pressures a few months before starting nursing school (perfecting your blood pressure measuring skills will be the most difficult part of this learning process).
Feel fully prepared now? Yeah.. I didn’t either. No one does. But we make it through somehow!
Happy Nursing!