Today was my first day of nursing school.  I’m in an accelerated course basically putting 2 years of nursing school into one.

We had so much information thrown at us today during the nearly 8 hours we were there.   We did the syllabus for our Transition into professional nursing course.  It was very detailed and a good amount of work to be done. We reviewed all the course content in blackboard.  (the didactic portion of the class is largely online) We learned of all the places that we could possibly get announcements, emails, messages, and changes in the schedule.  There are a bunch that need to be checked everyday.  We got a new calendar, different from the one we got before school started.  I panicked a little about that and was texting Raul (the guy who makes the schedule) during the orientation and he assured me that they would work with me.  Phew!

I learned when my clinical dates would be. I have three at the hospital where I work (mother/baby) on Wednesdays and three at Arnold Palmer hospital for children (pediatrics).

We will have case studies and quizzes on a separate website for Transition and Pharmacology.  We registered two of our books on this website today.

The other RT in my class has been placed in the other class from me but we will still have lab together. I learned some more about her today and that was nice. We were put into our discussion groups which we will use for group discussion board.  This is where we all work on a portion of a scenario, post about it, then one of us takes all the information and puts it together for part of the grade. This means I have to depend on others for my grade seemingly.  I’m not sure I’m happy about that but the girls I have been placed with seem like they will do a good job. All of this is to help us understand the greater topic. I guess it’s better than listening to a lecture day after day. We already did a discussion question today.  The topic is legal and ethical issues.  Mine had to do with end of life and decision-making by the family.  Interesting scenario  it is.

My teacher is nice and they don’t want us to fail.  So that’s good.  Everything is not abundantly clear to me yet and I feel a little overwhelmed at this point but we’ll see how it goes.

I’ve got to get my stuff organized for tomorrow.  Orientation day 2 is tomorrow.