Your Nursing Survival Guide

WHY I CHOSE NURSING - A STUDENT'S PERSPECTIVE Jacinta McKay - Elsevier Ambassador

To be brutally honest, I didn't want to be a nurse when I finished high school. I applied for paramedicine and nursing was my back up. I chose to go with nursing as I got in close to home and knew I could easily transfer over to paramedicine, or worst case scenario finish nursing and then do paramedicine. Over time my career goals changed. I completed a year of my degree at one university then transferred to a combined arts and nursing degree majoring in history. Early in my first year, I realised that nursing was where I was supposed to be. The choices that lead me to nursing and the reasons it attracted me weren't clear, even to me, until I realised what nursing was. To someone who hadn’t spent a lot of time in hospitals and knew nursing from

Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs, I thought I would just go to work, be told what to do by a doctor and then go home. I realised many things in my first year of nursing that are impossible to learn until you find yourself in the thick of it on your first placement. So instead of writing about why I chose to start my nursing degree, I'll tell you what I have learnt about nursing and why I chose to stay in my nursing degree. Firstly, I learnt that being there for someone else is also beneficial to you. TV shows are horrible at showing the nurse-patient relationship, instead they tend to make the patient a problem to solve. But when you find yourself in a room with a person who’s life has been turned upside down because of their health, you realise that nursing is more than problem-solving. It's not just

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