Comments from a teacher offer hints of my future
– Fourth year student in the School of Nursing (female student)
With the curriculum of the School of Nursing, students make progress with specialized educational courses that have been organized from the viewpoint of personal development while pursuing their own roles through an incredible variety of general education courses. I feel that this furnishes the students with the ability to look at themselves objectively and to understand the patients’ background circumstances as people. For example, the teacher for the Performing Arts (Drama) class that I took in my sophomore year said to me, “Before you rush off to go solving a problem, try pulling up a chair and place these anxious feelings.” If I am not able to face up to my own anxieties, then how can I be expected to deal with the anxieties of the patients? … Even now I sometimes realize the very meaning of words that was spoken to me by a teacher in a class that seemingly had no direct bearing on nursing work. There are times at the training site where my mind hasn’t caught up with my actions when I am rushing ahead too much with a treatment.
There are also times when I overlook a patient’s countenance or gestures because all I can think of is quickly solving the problem. I get the feeling as if my teacher had been offering hints from long ago to the person I am today.
A real sense that you are growing through the classes
– Third year student in the School of Nursing (male student)
In my Lifelong Developmental Nursing III class the other day, the students were divided up into teams to discuss with one another about how to provide nursing care to hypothetical patients for which factors like their age, occupation, and the condition of their illness had been established in advance. In just a few minutes we were able to pull together a dozen some items within our team, which surprised even me. When I did the same assignment in my sophomore year, I was barely able to offer any accurate comments, and so this gave me a real sense that I was internalizing a nursing perspective through my classes. I think that your sophomore and junior years are a time when you have to memorize tons of information through your studies and classes on discussions and specialized subjects, and it is also when the assignments for reports suddenly grow more difficult. But if you can make it to the point where you are able to understand this, then these are also the years when you get a taste for how interesting nursing care is. There have been many more times when my classmates have helped me out and so I can’t go around making grand statements, yet even so I would like to do everything I can with a view towards achieving my own personal growth.