Celebration and Advice for New Nurses
“I will not tell a lie. Nursing school is one of the hardest things I have ever done!,” wrote Lesley Dokes ’12. Believe it or not, she’s not actually trying to scare new students away. Instead, she uses her blog for the School of Nursing to give incoming students tips on how to survive an accelerated nursing program.
As new students begin their courses, they’re greeted not only with advice from bloggers, but also with a “Welcome Back Garden Party” where they join returning students for music, good food, and hula hoops.
While new students trickled in through the summer, the School said goodbye to others: the traditional baccalaureate class and graduate students (260 graduates in May), the accelerated baccalaureate class (115 grads in July), and even more graduate students (16 grads in August).
Kimberly Chalco, who graduated with the accelerated class in July, offered advice on her blog as well: “What helps you learn it all is the environment Hopkins provides: the professors are great, the students are all amazing, and it creates this very supportive environment. This is the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life, but it’s also one of the best.”
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Check out more blogs and videos:
Seven Tips on How to Survive an Accelerated Nursing Program
By Lesley Dokes, ’12
- Encourage and affirm yourself. Place words of affirmations on your mirror, send reminders to your cell phone, affirm then reaffirm that you are at Johns Hopkins for a reason and you are supposed to be here.
- Encourage and affirm others. When you encourage others you, by default, encourage yourself. When you open up, share, encourage and affirm, you’ll find you are not alone in anything you are experiencing in nursing school.
- Surround yourself with good people. Whether they are friends, family, or other nursing students, you will need a good core group of people who have your best interest at heart.
- Do something that expresses you. When you are able to express yourself, you can release certain energies that may keep you from focusing clearly in your studies. Everyone needs an outlet.
- Be self-aware. You will feel a wide range of emotions while going through this program. Be aware of yourself and how your emotions affect your study habits, how you treat yourself and other people.
- Listen to positive music. I wake up to music every morning. Buzzing alarms make me grumpy, so I fill my iPod with upbeat stuff to start my days off right.
- Keep the end goal in mind. Be good to yourself!
