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Each college semester allowed a new start: the classes, the teachers, the professors, and the mindset, all new. I would go into the first class with the ideal study habits as my goal. Sometimes my good intentions would last the first week. Looking back at my own experience without counting summer intersessions, I had twenty-seven semesters, half of those were as a full-time student, and only six of them were dropping any bad habits. Nursing 101 Fundamentals was a class that opened my eyes, a final grade of 73 or less means you are failing, failing this particular class in my program implies you were done and could not retake the course. The student would have to reapply. The stakes so high, my study habits would have to change for good.
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Procrastination
Typically, after a lecture, I turned my brain off. I did my learning for the day it was time to pick up Chinese food or pizza, get into comfy clothes and finish binging the season of whatever show I was watching. Days off between working and class I would want to relax. In trying to relax precious time that should have been used to study would disappear. This habit decreases your actual study time drastically. The farther out from initially learning the material and reviewing reduces the amount of information that is retained by long term memory.
Not studying
Trying to have all the experiences that college has to offer can be fun and overwhelming. Whether in a dorm or commuting activities both fun and obligatory eventually will take up time. The exam date will approach very quickly, and when time is not taken to review the material properly, the exam will come and go with poor results. The amount of information given including concepts and several pieces that need memorizing, without the time and effort little to no progress made and the exam and semester will have been a complete waste of time and money.
Pulling all-nighter and cram sessions
The combination of not studying and procrastination leads to the potential of the dreaded all-nighter. When I lived in the dorms one of my roommates, a business major, would wait until the night before an exam to study everything. She would skip classes that day and spend hours making flash cards. While the third roommate and I went to bed, she gathered her stuff and continue to study in the community room. She would return to the dorm room sometime between 5 and 7, most times she would come in as we were starting to wake up and get ready to go the early morning classes. Her grades, although, got her from semester to semester never were terrific, keep in mind her program also did not have the standards that most nursing programs do, only the rules of the university. The overnighters lead to not reviewing all the material and retaining a small percentage of the information.
Distractions
In today’s world, you are always connected to everyone, everywhere, at all times. At times it is a powerful tool to be so connected at all times when you want actually to put focus and time into something, this can be a huge time suck. As someone that has fallen down the youtube rabbit hole more than once. I highly recommend either finding a way to gain excellent will power or turn off social media during study sessions. There are several programs for laptops, tablets, and phone that will turn off apps for a specific length of time. You can allow certain websites to be accessed and that’s it. If you do not have will power and fall into the rabbit hole often, I highly recommend finding one of these apps.
Not Taking breaks
Moving on from those of you who don’t study to those who do nothing but study. On the contrary, some students eat, sleep, and breath studying. As productive as you think this can be, there is something called over-studying. After a while, everything starts to look the same, and new information doesn’t stick as it should. The suggestion I offer here is to take breaks. When reviewing the data for a final exam my whole life revolved around retaining as much information as possible. I found that after a few hours my head hurt, my eyes became unfocused, and words no longer made sense. I stopped and took a break, made dinner, made coffee, walked my dog, any activity that didn’t include reading and information. The secret here is to come back to studying refreshed.
The first semester of nursing school, you will learn quickly that these study habits are dropped, you need to find more productive habits. Did you have any bad habits that you realized you couldn’t continue during nursing school?