Nursing school day 1

Thursday was my first official day in nursing school. Let me tell ya, folks...it was a doozy. 

The second summer session includes Introduction and Fundamentals of Nursing as well as what school calls, "Nursing Boot Camp". It's going to be an adventure.

It was the first day so they had to get all those first day things out of the way. There are 22 of us in our cohort, which I think is a really great number. It's not too big that you get lost in the shuffle, but it's not too small either. 

This is how I started my day...

I had a lot of nervous excitement, my mind was full of questions, and was just overall ready to get this show on the road. 

Upon arrival, we have assigned seats. Each table has little cubicle dividers on the table top and our names are taped to the front. The professor says it is more for her to learn our names, but I actually like it. It's our own little space for the remainder of the course. 

The class room has a refrigerator for us to put our lunches in, we have a coffee machine, and enough styrofoam cups to last until the apocalypse. 

So first things first...we signed in. She handed out all of the forms we needed to start out...syllabus, calendar, assignments, etc. Then she told us to come pick up three more books...for a total of 5 books for this summer course. 

As we went over the expectations, I started to get a bit nervous. We are in class until August 14th and we are going to get through 46 chapters!!! Oh my. We have a test every week...on Tuesdays. Every day we have homework assignments due. Those are based out of our giant Fundamentals of Nursing book. 

Then we have the ATI texts. 

Those are the orange Pharmacology and yellow Community Health nursing books. There is also a red one not pictured but it is the same size as the orange one. It's currently in my car because I took it with me to Jansen's tennis lessons last night so I could work on it. Anyway, the red book is the one we are to use to create our notebook. The notebook is to consist of an outline for each chapter and the answers to the end of chapter questions. Those are due almost every day. The first 6 chapters are due next week. 

Then we have ATI assignments on the ATI website. We added about 13 virtual classes to that site in class and will be completing and turning those in by August 12th. I haven't started those yet incidentally. 

We also have something called a Concept Map, which due dates will be assigned at a later date. 

We have an Ethics project/presentation due in August.

And my favorite little piece of confusing information...the Prep U. Our big text book came in a bundle with something called Coursepoint. This is basically just an online version of the text with extra study features. It includes quizzes. Now these aren't your standard "for a grade" quizzes. 

For each chapter, there are practice quizzes. We must take the quizzes until we reach a mastery level of 5. The quizzes are different every time. These are for a grade. So it seems like an automatic grade in the end...but the kicker is, it could take 5 quizzes or 25 quizzes to get a ML of 5. Case in point, I started Chapter 1 yesterday and had to take 9 quizzes before I got to a ML 5!!! This is going to take forever!!! But in the end, it is a great way to study and cement these concepts in our minds....so I see why they require it. 

We then had to meet up with someone we didn't know, get to know them for about 10 minutes, and then present them to the class. A fun getting to know you game. 

The Coursepoint rep came to show us how to navigate all the online stuff. 

The director of the nursing program came to hand out our background check info. 

We added all the online courses to the laptops that they rent out to us. 

We signed a bunch of papers, and then called it a day. 

By the time I got home, I had so many things swirling in my head that I had to get started. I came home and started reading and outlining. 

So all in all, the first day was good. Full of information, but good. I am excited to be in the program and see the other juniors in our cohort. It's going to be an adventure for sure!!!