Anyone else quietly wondering if they picked wrong?
Kai between clinicals and workThe question
Last semester, twenty four hours a week at my job, and somewhere in the last month I started dreading the drive to clinical.
Not the patients. Everything around them. The paperwork, the group project nobody is doing, the person who talks over the whole post conference.
I am not trying to talk myself out of finishing. I am trying to work out whether this is a normal part of the end of a program, or whether it is information I should be listening to.
If you felt this and stayed, what changed. If you felt it and left, I would honestly rather hear that too.
The conversation
3 replies- Maya on nightsRN, med surg nights, 8 months in
Dreading the program is not the same as dreading the job, and I could not tell those apart until I was out of one and into the other. School was other people's deadlines stacked on top of mine. Work is hard in a way that at least belongs to me.
That is not a promise it lifts for you. It is the one distinction I wish somebody had drawn while I was still in it.
- Nia bridging from LPNLPN of three years, in the RN bridge now
I had already been doing the work for three years when I started the bridge and I still hit this in month four. What did it for me was that school makes you perform competence for a grade, and by then I had actual competence and no patience left for the performance.
Check which one you are tired of. Mine turned out to be the performing.
- Indira in home healthRN, home health, 2 years
Counter view, because you asked for it. I finished, worked the floor, and eventually left it for something else in nursing. The degree did not trap me anywhere. Almost every part of this field looks different from the inside than it did in a post conference.
So the honest version is that finishing keeps more doors open than quitting does, and dreading one semester of paperwork is thin evidence about a career.
What would you tell them?
Answer from what you have seen. It posts without your name.
