From a young age I have always been interested in the sciences. At school I remember always really enjoying my science courses. In high school I took a public health course that was offered as an elective and this was my first exposure to looking at the field of healthcare. We learned about the history of vaccines and different diseases of significance through history. This class really sparked my interest in pursuing a career in healthcare, so I applied for nursing university programs. I ended up getting in, however when the time came to choose my program I was feeling uncertain if nursing was the correct field for me within healthcare. I decided to keep my options slightly more open while still focusing on human health, so I took my undergraduate degree in biomedical sciences at the university of Guelph.
Throughout this program I took courses focused on human health, biochemistry and nutrition and I really enjoyed learning about them, but I was still unsure about what exact career I wanted to pursue after my degree. After graduation I decided to take a year off of school and work at my job at Costco to save some money before deciding what to do. During this time, I was building a potential career at Costco. They offer a program for university graduates to become fast-tracked into a manager position, and I worked hard to get in. They offered me the position, but while I was waiting for the program to start I realized that this was not the type of career I could see myself enjoying in the long run. I found myself getting home at the end of my shifts feeling aimless and unfulfilled. I felt like I had lost my purpose until I realized what was missing. I was not using my education, and I was stuck in a job for which I had no passion. I had been working so hard to achieve this goal of getting into the manager program, but I failed to think about the fact that I did not want to be a manager. I realized that to feel fulfilled I would want to come home at the end of a shift, even if it was a really bad day, and know that I had done something to have a positive impact on someone in some way. I also realized that I wanted to use my education to find a career in healthcare because that is what I am passionate about. I decided that nursing was the career that I could see myself in, and that it would provide me that fulfillment I was missing at Costco. I applied for compressed nursing programs, accepted my offer to Trent University and found myself an apartment in Peterborough.
With this new sense of direction, I felt so much better going into work everyday knowing that I had just begun a journey into a new career and this reassured me that I had made the right decision. I was so excited to start my nursing journey and as I began my preparations for school, I was feeling nervous but excited about what was to come. I knew that nursing school would be difficult, but I felt ready to face it. Now that I am here and have begun my courses, I have felt so excited for next semester when we can begin our clinical placements. We have been learning about how to build therapeutic relationships with patients, and relational communication techniques. Although I have not learned any clinical skills yet, I feel confident that this knowledge will help me make meaningful connections with clients, and I feel that I will be able to at the very least help bring some positivity to their days.
However, nursing school is not without its challenges. Firstly, the workload and academic demands are more than what I anticipated. I have found that most of the material to require a lot of critical thinking and application and I have also begun to realize the great responsibility that nurses have in keeping people safe. There are so many skills to master and guidelines to keep in mind, and I am fearful about making a mistake that could harm someone. To cope with these factors, resilience and self-care will be important for me to adopt. A cross-sectional study of Australian nursing students in 2020 found that ‘grit’ which is a trait that combines perseverance, persistence and passion, is correlated with both clinical and academic performance (Terry & Peck, 2020). Bearing that in mind, to help cope with feelings of stress I can remind myself of my passion for nursing, and work on my perseverance and persistence through mistakes and setbacks. I can work on viewing mistakes as learning opportunities and remembering that everyone starts out being new and not knowing how to do everything. In the remainder of my program it will be important to exhibit resilience by not giving up in the face of adversity and to not be too hard on myself when things do not go according to plan. This will help me be successful in my studies, as a student nurse, and eventually as a nurse as well – to not become consumed by mistakes and to keep striving for continual improvement of my practice. Resilience has also been found to correlate with lower levels of nursing student stress, which will be important in coping with the academic demands of nursing school (Smith et al., 2022). Finally, incorporation of mind-body self care into routine of nursing students, such as yoga, aromatherapy and mindful breathing has been associated with an increased ability to manage stress (Drew et al., 2016). To adopt these into my routine, I can use the self-care plan I designed for my NURS 1000 class which included taking walks in nature and mindful breathing exercises to improve my sleep. Incorporating these strategies of self-care, resilience and perseverance will help me get through nursing school and prepare me to begin my career as a nurse.