I can kick back tonight with my glass of red wine and newly shaved legs and just...relax. I am halfway through my first semester of nursing school. I think most of us learned within days of beginning our junior year that the ONLY way to juggle umpteen balls in the air is to take it one day at a time. There really is no other way. Our junior class of 42 students is in our own little world. We have all our classes together and so we just basically follow each other from class to class all day. Including clinicals, we spend virtually all our time together. I'm making an effort to learn the names of everyone in our class, not just the accelerated juniors (there are 9 of us). We live and breathe personality disorders, respiratory acidosis, lung and heart assessments, learning how to insert a catheder, and therapeutic communication. I've found a lovely study group and we typically meet every Tuesday afternoon in the library. I rotate between Jones Science Building, the Student Center, and the library. Nothing else really exists on campus. Occasionally I go to chapel when it is held on Mondays and Wednesdays as it is a nice respite in my day, wedged in between my classes. I love that it is worship and that it is hosted by different groups on campus and that there is always hot, strong coffee and baked treats homemade by somebody afterward. I wish I could stay and mingle a little afterwards, but I have class 10 minutes afterward and so I usually just grab a cup of coffee which I try not to slosh as I scurry to class across campus and a baked goodie as well.
Let me just say that it is so nice to be apart of a program in which the professors truly care about the students that comprise the school of nursing. We are the school of nursing and they recognize that and appreciate us. At PLU, I never really got the impression that my professors in my art major cared about me, despite the fact that I was passionate about my major. I was halfway through my junior year when I happened to talk to a professor who had taught my art education class that fall semester about a career in the arts. She was amazed I had made it 2 1/2 years in college without an advisor. That's right folks. I did not have an advisor in college; I was completely self-advised. It was never enforced when I was a student at PLU that every student visit their advisor prior to enrolling in classes. (Apparently it was by the time Joe was a student in 2007.) So that meant I fumbled through my years at PLU, searching for faculty support, but never really finding it. I think some of my friends and classmates just knew how to be buddy-buddy or hob nob or whatever with their professors. I did not. Or I didn't know how. Or knew that I was supposed to do that.
However...the passionate, but lost art major grew up and became a nursing major. Who would've thought?? I think I heard horror stories about how A & P was the "weed-out" class for folks attempting to major in the sciences and how nursing majors had no life. (The later is true, by the way.) I believed too often what others told me about how I seemed to struggle with details and was too absent-minded for the sciences. Aha...the power of believing the negative things people say to me. I almost let it get the best of me. Almost. But I decided to follow my heart and my heart led me from my dorm room way back at PLU all the way out to the Midwest to Moorhead, MN where the Concordia College school of nursing is. I know I complain about school sometimes, but most of the time, I am so glad I am here. I am grateful for the opportunity to finish my education, albeit 10 years later than most of my classmates.
