Calling Christian Grey!

Another week of school in the books!

While it was a short week, it felt super long.  The week started with lab and it started with anxiety.  In class the week before, our instructor told us we needed to complete chapters 3,4,8 and 9 for lab the following week, which is what I did being the good little nursing student.  However I made the mistake of not verifying this with the lab schedule, which told us we needed to complete 8,9, and 10.  Luckily I was not the only person who only listened to the instructor and our lab preceptor was nice enough to give us a reprieve.  The rest of lab was vitals and restraints.  Of course you cant have a room with about 15 women, bring up restraints, and not discuss whether you have or have not read the 50 Shades series and how fast you have read it. (Of course I have read it! Each book in less than 3 days. I loved it, no matter how cheesy.  Dont judge!) I love my lab group, especially my instructor, because we are able to joke and have fun with the subject matter while still getting our objectives accomplished.

Speaking of torture, all evening student had to meet at Metro campus on Wednesday night for our Clinical Orientation.  Before heading over, I made a quick stop to pick up my ID badge for clinicals and was lucky enough to run into a fellow classmate who was awesome enough to give me a ride to Metro campus (Thanks, Elizabeth!) We arrived just in time for the start.  The orientation began with a presentation by the Tri-C librarian asking who completed their library homework....WHAT?! My fellow westshore mates and I looked at each other in horror as we had no clue what the woman was talking about.  She went on for about a half hour about how to use the library.  I thought this was a waste of valuable study time.  Everyone has completed pre-reqs to get into the program, and I am sure in at least one of these classes they have used the library.  To throw on an extra busy work assignment, which apparently takes an hour to complete, on top of all of the other work we have to do is frustrating.

Following the librarian we had a presentation by the book manufacturer about our books and how they are available as ebooks.  This lead me to wonder, "Why are we hearing about this the second week of the semester when we have already bought our books?" While the presentation did have a lot of useful information, I think it would have been much better to have the presentation BEFORE classes started so we are better educated about what books are needed and the cost involved and so forth.  However, I thought it was rude when they asked for feedback about the process and every slightly negative comment, no matter how constructive it was, was met with a defensive response from the Tri-C representative basically saying that all of our feedback was irrelevant because WE didnt do enough.  Note to everyone: If you dont want to hear the answer, dont ask the question.  No one is perfect and we were just offering our feedback on the process because you asked for it.  I thought the book rep did do an excellent job in presenting all of the features of the books, even if some of them were too late.

Next we were given study tips for surviving nursing school.  I thought these were great, especially the part where they broke down the NCLEX style of questions.  The problem with this portion was they were done at 7:20, while we werent meeting with clinical instructors until 8:00.  So instead we wasted another 40 minutes, which has now upped my lost study time for tonight to about 80 minutes.  Extremely frustrating, especially considering the math test out we had the next day.

Finally we got to meet our clinical instructors and after meeting mine, I am totally excited for clinicals.  Any anxiety I had was immediately erased and I cant wait until next weekend to get started!

Thursday nights class started with our first ever math test out.  I wasnt too worried about it to begin with since Im pretty good with math as long as I have a calculator.  The test out was so easy you almost didnt even need it! We all took about 5 minutes to celebrate getting over that hurdle before the stress started setting in over the first exam for 1450 next Thursday. Commence the hair pulling! (But please stow your twitchy palm... ;))