My name is Michelle, and I’m officially a third of the way through my school’s nursing program and that much closer to qualifying to write the CRNE¹. My school doesn’t have letter grades, but according to my other post-secondary school that’s an A average.

I just got my final grades in for the term and I have (again) a GPA of 85%! My highest grade was in Clinical Skills (clinical is a pass-fail course, so no percentage for that), which makes me happy as it’s one of the most important for considerations of preceptorship choices. Having good marks in clinical skills, pathophysiology, microbiology and immunology  are the makings for getting a good preceptorship choice. Possible choices right now include: emergency, med-surg or high acuity. I adored my clinical rotation in the surgical unit, but I’m curious about emergency. Not because of the medical shows that I watch/used to watch², don’t get me wrong. Medical shows are wrong and are all about the drama. For instance? On-call rooms? Haven’t come across one at all. Maybe it’s an American hospital type of thing. Also, why are the IVs never dripping in tv shows? It’s all wrong – I’m a joy to have around when a medical drama is on, I swear. I don’t get to make preceptorship choices until (I think) January 2014 and my preceptorships don’t start until January 2015 – never hurts to think ahead! My next term (August-December) and my clinical rotations are: mental health/psych, maternity and pediatrics.

As for my summer classes… Lots of reading, with stupidly expensively reading materials, and discussions about things that I don’t actually care about. It’s… required. If it wasn’t, I would spend my summer doing fun things – like vacationing, reading for leisure, working on blogs. Instead I’ll be doing things like: reading for school, vacationing, working on blogs… It’ll be interesting an interesting summer, that’s for sure! I’m hoping that my grant money³ comes soon as I, unfortunately, have greater expenses than an income (comes from being an unemployed student).

Readings and more readings. Such is my life.

Last week I finished off my last final for the term. Being done the second term means that I finished my first ‘year’ of nursing school. Officially, year two doesn’t start until August. Until then, I have summer classes to contend with. Let’s discuss how much I’m not looking forward the sheer amount of reading that one of my classes has (5-10 extra readings besides the textbook, the pdf files start at 25 pages and go up from there…). So while I’m working away on my summer readings (and there’s quite a bit of it), I’ll also be taking in some tv time, as well as hanging out with friends and even some traveling.

For one of my classes, I have to read this entire book this week. And it’s the one that has a ton of readings weekly. Pretty sure even if I were to devote every waking moment reading for that class, I wouldn’t get it done.

I’m still waiting on my final grades to be released. I know roughly what my GPA is going to be, but still waiting for the ‘official’ numbers is annoying me. I’m also still waiting on a final exam mark for one class. Fingers crossed for doing well!

School, school and more school.

Finals are coming up soon. I have 2 more days of clinical left, 1 week of classes and then 1 week of finals! People in my class (class = everyone that started the program with me) are talking about going out to the pub after the last final (patho). It ends at 12:30pm – but it’s always happy hour somewhere in the world.