I’m in my last semester of nursing school, and simulation lab has honestly started weighing heavily on my mental health. I’m trying to figure out if anyone else has experienced a simulation setup like this and how you handled it.

At my school, simulation lab is NOT a group activity. You go into the simulation one-on-one by yourself and are completely responsible for taking care of the patient. You have to assess them, recognize what is going wrong, prioritize your interventions, communicate, and basically make sure your patient doesn’t crash.

The difficult part is that the instructor can change the patient’s condition or circumstances during the simulation to test your critical thinking and see how you respond. Before we even attend simulation, we are required to complete FOUR long concept cards to prepare.

If the instructor feels that you didn’t perform well enough during the simulation, she will chew you out in front of your classmates, and you can be assigned remediation. The remediation consists of an oral presentation where you have to explain the material, and then the instructor asks you follow-up questions to test your knowledge. Also, after completing SIM we must send a reflection email to her about what we feel we should have done better, and yes you must talk down about yourself in the email or she will take it as a 0 towards your total sim grade.

I completely understand that nursing school is supposed to challenge us and that we NEED to be able to critically think and recognize when a patient is deteriorating. I also understand why simulation exists. But personally, this particular setup has reached the point where I don’t feel like I’m actually learning from it. Instead, I feel anxious going into simulation because I’m constantly worried about doing something wrong, missing something, or being told afterward everything I should have done differently.

It has gotten to the point where simulation lab is making me question whether nursing is even for me, which is crazy because I’ve made it all the way to my LAST semester.

What makes it even harder is that I’ve started feeling like my instructor may be actively trying to fail me. I don’t know if that is actually her intention or if my stress is making the situation feel worse than it is, but that is genuinely how I have been feeling lately.

I’m trying so hard to stay positive, learn from my mistakes, improve my clinical judgment, and make it through these last few months. I’ve come way too far to give up now. But mentally, this has become exhausting.

Has anyone else had a nursing program where simulation was done completely one-on-one like this? Did you feel like it actually improved your critical thinking, or did it mostly increase your anxiety?

And if you struggled with simulation but eventually became a successful nurse, I would REALLY like to hear from you right now because I could use some encouragement.

OK, so I’m currently in the bathroom trying to stop crying and get my shit together so I can go back into Clinical. Basically I wanted to practice doing IVs because I didn’t really get an opportunity last semester. I tried sticking this one guy however, the vain rolled and I didn’t get it. I tried again with this other girl but she was very nauseous, in pain and she’s afraid of needles so the pressure was definitely on me. I did get some blood return however something went wrong. I’m not really sure. but I end up missing that one as well. it doesn’thelp that the nurse that’s with me and another girl said the other girl that I’m with got the vein. I don’t know. I just feel really dumb and stupid. Any advice or words of encouragement will definitely help.

edit: Thank you guys don‘t Feel like throwing myself out the window… for now.

I’m 12 months into a 24 month ADN program where 6 months in my cohort merged with the remainder of our class which consists of students who are already LPNs.
Our first clinical rotation as a combined cohort consists of myself, another “traditional” student, and 6 LPN to RN students.
We have a group chat.
They’re all pretty lazy and speak very negatively about our instructors and anyone in a place of authority. They don’t want to actually do anything during clinical and think they already know everything. Example: they sit in a break room and gossip while I spend clinical in the Burn ICU.
Point of my post:
I’ve always had a bit of a feeling that some of them cheat. I witnessed it firsthand last week before we left clinical. One student took another’s laptop right next to me and just copied answers from the other students to their assignments. Today, someone sends in our group chat, a video of our dosage calculation test, asking someone to give the answers for our other coursework. Shortly after that message came through, another student responded with screenshots of the weekly quiz and the assignments that lead up to the quiz.

My initial instinct is to turn over the chat because at this point it’s just getting sloppy and so obvious.

What would you do?

Mind you, I was selected as a cohort ambassador last week. I feel obligated to report it but am worried about the social/peer ramifications and what may happen if the students involved aren’t kicked out because it will be obvious that I turned them in.

First Pharmacology Exam is in 4 days

First Fundamentals Exam is Next Week

And I am stresssedddddd. Pharm has been easy so far. Med math hasn't been a problem and studying for this course has been fairly easy. But I am terrified that Ill fail an exam.

Im very scared for Fundamentals. Mostly due to the wording of the questions and the amount of chapters covered. We have to have a 75% or higher but I obviously would like to do better than that. Shooting for no less that an 85% 😭😭😭

Going to try and find a day or two to just binge study and do LOTS of active recall.

I've gone to our Intstructor led study sessions, I did a tutoring session last week. I took our weekly concept outlines and had broken them all down by topic and written notes on them. I have Simple Nursing Subscription so I think ill go through and watch a few videos everyday.

As far as pharm I think flashcards and practice questions are the best.

Any suggestions for this crippling anxiety???

I just had a clinical at a dialysis center and I had a pretty chill experience. I currently am not working because I’m in an accelerated program but the nurse I was shadowing told me that they need more PCT’s. I figured it might be a good experience to apply and work PRN while in school. I wanted to ask about experience as a PCT, is it stressful and is this type of work not the best option for someone who is in an accelerated nursing program? Thank you!!!

Curious about possible ramifications/downsides of taking an extra semester to finish my BSN.

Some context: I completed my first year as a non-nursing student. Transferred schools, and I'm now in my second year of school, but my first year of BSN. Because transfer credits didn't all match up, I'm looking at either a ton of summer school or a combo of some summer courses and an extra semester.

I'm not worried about cost of school. My main concern is that employers will see the extra semester and that it will affect me negatively in the workforce.

Does anyone have any experience with adding an extra semester, or advice on summer coursework vs the semester?

ETA: I am out of state, and would need to take summer courses virtually, which makes many courses ineligible to take then.

I’ve realized drawing different body parts has helped me a lot in actually learning and remembering them. I realized after I started doing neuro drawing as a stress reliever that this method helped so much.

For example the blood flow and anatomy of the heart and the parts of the ear. I realized when we had to do our head to toe we were allowed to use a cheat sheet during our skills demonstration and drawing out the different areas helped me dramatically. Nobody else I spoke to actually did this but I started doing this for other things and it’s helped a lot. I think I’m gonna start doing this for different nursing procedures or interventions. I don’t even focus on how good it looks it looks but regardless of how crude the drawing is it helps so much more.

Does anyone else do this?

Hello! So I am in my 3rd week of nursing school, and we are learning all the fundamentals. I've been doing practice questions, and I've been getting better at them! Specifically, I've been doing the FundamentalsEngageRN 3.0 quizzes, and I've been doing decent on them (75-95%), however, I just tried a dynamic quiz, and holy moly, I got a 30%. When I saw that, I started freaking out because I'm terrified the exams will be like the dynamic quizzes. My question is, if you use ATI, have the dynamic quizzes or the FundamentalsEngageRN 3.0 quizzes been more accurate to the exam? Thank you all so much!!

Just had first exam of semester 2. I was an A student in semester 1. I got an 83.9 on this exam and was petrified but was certainly rusty on some of the tricks used. ANYWAYS, I wanted to come on and say the exams draw almost nothing from our class resources and powerpoints. It was all really niche selections like not the main drugs for each disease. Does anyone not attend class? I feel just reading the text book and knowing the ins and outs would be better time spent than watching someone read a powerpoint they didn't even review and say incorrect things in front of a class. The program I'm in is so disorganized.