With that done, it was on to A&P, something I certainly would not be cramming for, but rather stressing for instead. A&P is fondly known as the killer class of sophomore year of nursing so I was not about to take it lightly. By Thursday night the word was that the nurses had taken over the library as some other nurses and I had taken over the Connelly (student) center. Any passerby would witness us yelling out "antecubital...occipital...inguinal" as we jumped up and pointed to the regions on our own bodies. I am sure we appeared intoxicated though I can assure you we were not-unlike the rest of the student body on a "thirsty Thursday." We managed to have fun while studying and I recognized more and more that as student nurses we are a team. We are all working toward the same goal and therefore helping each other out is truly representative of our titles as student nurses.

Needless to say, Friday after 11:20 AM I am rather certain I actually heard a sigh of relief from eighty or so females. One super rough week down, approximately... too many more to even guess, left.

A&P is going to be my toughest class by far this year simply due to the volume of material that I am going to have to memorize. However, after looking over some of the initial material I found myself surprised that I knew many of the terms from my experience in-and-out-of doctor's offices for my JRA.

This course is going to test my time management skills that I thought I improved upon last year, but coupled with cell bio and genetics I am definitely going to have to step up my game.

My nursing classes already feel much more "nursing" involved than last year. But I must say the name of the game so far has been that we, as the nursing class of 2011, are going to get intimate in both A&P and the nursing lab. From that you can expect many fun stories.

Until then, I'm so excited to be starting the new school year and to be diving into real nursing practices! As I keep saying to my friends...I'm almost a real person. Yikes!

The feeling of being back on campus is better than I could have ever imagined. As much as I enjoyed being home, independence while surrounded by all of my friends is hard to top.

As my friends and I walked through the grotto on the first night, we reveled in the fact that no longer was Villanova a mystery and that it sure was nice to actually have friends on the first day of classes. The overwhelming concern of "who am I going to eat lunch with?" was gone and replaced with an influx of text messages reading "Dinner in IK at 6?"(The concern then immediately shifted from dinner mates, to gaining weight).

Freshman year of college is always cracked up to be the best year, but so far I am much happier this year than I ever was last year. For me, having a safety net of people and the overall feeling of familiarity, outweighs the thrill of mystery and new people. And because the college population is so large there are always more people to meet even after a year, or two or three.

My May to August insanely long summer has finally come to an end. The feeling is bittersweet-on one hand I will be going back to 'nova, seeing all of my friends and getting back into a routine but on the other hand I will be saying goodbye to free meals with my parents and the comfort of being home in San Diego. It's funny how you look so forward to summer but when it's time to get back to school you almost are yearning for your agenda full of various assignments (okay so maybe "yearning" is a bit of an exaggeration, but I'm not going to lie, I am certainly ready to be back at school again).

My experiences babysitting taught me more than I expected this summer. It was my first job that was five days a week-sometimes more-and was pretty much the standard 9am-5pm. I learned to manage my finances more responsibly, to cherish the evenings and an early bed time, to adjust to working out at 5am instead of 5pm and, overall, to simply be more responsible. In terms of children, I definitely learned some important things-the importance of child-to-child interaction outside of school and the fact that children are truly products of their parents. Clearly those were just a few of the things I learned, but those seemed to come into play the most throughout the summer Despite my initial negative feeling toward the situation, it was a very positive experience that I am glad to have had.

However, after spending two months straight with a nine year old, needless to say I am ready to spend time with people my own age. I will be heading back east next week for wedding festivities surrounding my boyfriend's brother and his fiancé and will stay out there until move-in on the 23^rd. My schedule this semester will be pretty tough with anatomy and physiology, cell biology and genetics and a nursing class with a lab. Alas, I will have more nursing-related classes, so for the first time in my life I think I will truly feel like I am working toward my career.

After picking up the girl I babysit from camp, I witnessed a very serious car accident. As I ascended up a hill on one of the main roads in the Del Mar/ Carmel Valley area of San Diego, I saw three cars totaled ahead of me. The accident had clearly occurred moments before. There was a Toyota Prius in the middle of the busy intersection totaled from the driver side by a Toyota FJ cruiser (a large SUV). As I stopped, a few people got out of their cars to try to help the woman in the Prius. Here I was faced with a choice. In the back of my car was my ultimate responsibility-the girl-but in front of me was a woman that needed help and needed it now.

I immediately dialed 911 and gave explicit details of what was before my eyes. After hanging up, I opened the door half deciding to get out and help decided instead to reevaluate the situation. Behind me traffic was building and although was in the end lane I was still not in a totally safe position-certainly not with a little girl in the back seat. So after swift deliberation I decided to stay in the car and eventually drove away as there was no purpose for me to remain at the scene as cars began making their way around the accident.

When I drove away I did not actually know if I made the right decision. I am CPR certified (if that would have even helped) and as far as I could tell there was no one on the scene helping that appeared to know any more than that. The woman could have had a possible neck/back injury so I figured that CPR probably would not have helped because she should have most likely remained in the car until professionals arrived to avoid making any possible injuries worse. The best thing I could have done in that situation, as far as I'm concerned, would have been to sit there and talk to her, keeping her conscious. I suppose if there were any areas bleeding I could have applied pressure but even then I think of sterility and risk of infection and become overwhelmed at the complete lack of knowledge I have in regards to immediate emergency care.

After talking to both of my parents that night I realized I made the right decision with the girl in the car, though it may not have seemed as such due to the guilt I felt when I drove away. I was eventually comforted by the fact that, unless I work in the ER I will never be appropriately prepared for that situation. However, when I am officially a nurse I will have more experience behind me and will know how to approach a similar situation, even if my actions are nothing more than helping to keep the person conscious.

My summer has been going quite well so far. I have been babysitting from 9am until 4pm Monday through Friday-give or take an hour or two on each end--and I can essentially dictate my own hours. I guess you could say I'm living the ultimate "employed" summer life. It is very thought-provoking to spend a substantial amount of time with a nine-year old girl as a nineteen-year-old college student. Not only does it allow me to relive many of my own childhood activities such as playing out in the street, doing cartwheels on the lawn and creating games of my own, but it allows me to also hold complete responsibility of someone other than myself. This may seem obvious but it truly does alter many of my own day-to-day habits due to the fact that I am in complete responsibility of another human life. When the sign reads 45 MPH I actually have to drive 45 MPH! I leave my sailor language at home, I triple check both ways to assure there are no cars in sight before allowing her to scooter across and, oddly enough, I find myself placing my hand on her back when we cross the street in a busy parking lot and putting her on the side closest to the curb or the parked cars.

I have always been a responsible person, but this almost intuitive protect-at-all-costs thing is, for lack of a better phrase, blowing my mind. Clearly this is yet another sign that I should be a nurse and maybe even, in the way way way future--at least ten years and a shiny object on my left hand--a mother. It also helps me to believe that maybe, just maybe, I possess the particular requirements to be a nurse that cannot be learned from a textbook or a professor. Genuine concern for another human, accompanied by the responsibility for that person (especially one that is not a family member or a friend) is something that is an integral aspect of nursing and was one of the very first ideas I learned about in my nursing class at Villanova ... funny how my typical summer job has posed a direct correlation to my nursing class.

With one year of nursing school under my belt the question of how to spend my summer arose. I am faced with a few challenges in regard to working a job or internship that is nursing related. The first challenge is that I have no clinical experience as of yet because Villanova's nursing program does not begin clinicals until the second part of second semester of sophomore year. As part of Villanova's undergraduate nursing, we are one of very few programs in the country that begin clinicals that early as is. So experience is my first challenge.

My second is that I live in San Diego and it seems that student nurses are given priority based upon being from a local university. Because I cannot yet work under the student nurse label without any experience, I was going to simply volunteer in a local hospital to get a feel for the hospital that did not involve being the patient. This seemed promising until I was informed that there were not any summer-only opportunities for volunteering even for a nursing student. I had to be from one of the local universities so that I could volunteer year round. 

It is frustrating to know that I cannot implement any of my knowledge from my freshman year in a practical manner. It is especially frustrating when I witness my friends and peers applying and receiving internships with everyone from prominent San Diego law firms to fancy aerospace companies to fast-paced marketing/advertising firms.

So, instead of trying on my nursing shoes, I will instead be keeping on my Rainbow flip-flops and playing nanny for the summer. Interestingly enough, one of my nursing professors actually recommended that for this unique freshman to sophomore summer that I should get a job that is not in a hospital as she suggests I will have an eternity to work in a hospital. I think that this is good advice, so although I will not be advancing in my field I will instead be rolling in the dough ... and the sand.

Although the school year has come to an end, I want to relate a few more experiences I had as a freshman student nurse. As a big portion of my second semester grade in my Introduction to Professional Nursing class (my only true nursing course my freshman year) was scenario testing. Scenario testing was a demonstration of how a student nurse would implement appropriate communication techniques with a patient in regard to his or her specific circumstance. We were required to wear lab coats, a watch with a second hand and a stethoscope and choose a scenario at random. The scenario explained the patient's recent diagnosis and a brief overview of his or her feelings toward that diagnosis. Our partner was the patient and vice versa and was given a script relating to the scenario.

In class, in preparation of this testing we spent quite a bit of time learning the big "no no's" of communication such as clichés, false reassurance, yes or no questions, etc. My only "issue" with this is that I understand the tremendous importance of communication and I definitely think it needs to be a main focus of freshman year nursing, but it is a skill that seems nearly impossible to teach. I was frustrated with being told that it was taboo to tell a patient "I know how you feel" and instead to replace it with "you must be feeling sad." Often the examples sounded as though the patient would feel patronized or frustrated with such responses. I felt very overwhelmed by all of the phrases I was supposed to avoid, when they seemed to be the instinctual ways in which I would respond to someone.

This frustration carried into my testing. My scenario was about an 8-year-old boy who had recently been diagnosed with asthma and needed to learn how to control his heart rate and breathing. The concern was that he was embarrassed to tell his friends and to have to learn something that none of his friends would have to learn. During the testing, I felt so mechanical. I felt like I was focusing far too much on what I was taught what to and not to say that I forgot to feel for the patient. I have no doubt that when the time comes I will be able to talk effectively to an 8-year-old patient. It seems that I simply need to keep the forbidden phrases in the back of my mind rather than in the front and communicate in the moment as I feel appropriate given my knowledge, experience and professional feelings.

Welcome everyone, to what I like to call chaos, a.k.a. my life as a student nurse at Villanova University.

As I reflect upon these last weeks I can barely recall the countless hours I spent studying for a biochemistry test-I like to call it a "school-induced blackout." However, what I can recall from those hours are the girls I spent the time studying with. The prospect of having classes for the next 3 years with only girls is terrifying. One can only handle so much estrogen in a single class room. But, what I discovered in studying with these girls was that we are a team. We each want the other to succeed and will help them to do so even if it means sitting in the nearby dining hall until 2am just to clarify the structure of a glycophospholipid and its function in the human body.

I only hope that this same sentiment can be carried through into the real nursing world when rather than studying carbohydrates and lipids, we will be managing and taking care of human beings, who with one simple mistake, can equate to life or death.

I became interested in nursing initially through my mom who was a neonatal intensive care unit nurse for 25 years in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and who now works in the Dermatology Clinic at Rady Children's Hospital. Whenever I was sick as I child I will never forget how comforting it was to have a mom who knew exactly how to take care of me. I used to love when people asked me what my mom did for a living. I would always pridefully explain that she "takes care of really sick babies that can fit in my hands." This interest in nursing expanded when I was 14 and was in and out of every different clinic from orthopedic oncology to cardiology prior to finally being diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. The diagnosis changed my life and through this I discovered that I wanted to take care of people and ultimately be a nurse.

How I ended up in Villanova's program is rather simple. After living in San Diego for 8 years and experiencing a very Laguna Beach-like (a reality show on MTV) 4 years in high school, I knew it was time to experience new things. I researched nursing programs mostly east of the Mississippi including Loyola Chicago, Drexel, Penn and Fairfield but ultimately decided on Villanova. And if you must know I also had a boy on the East that I wanted to be closer to as the whole long distance bit can only last so long. Though, ultimately Villanova was the best nursing program I was accepted into and after visiting the campus, I knew immediately it was right for me. So, it's Go Wildcats for the next four years and "Nova Nursing4L."