As I enter my sophomore fall finals week, I have started to look back on my experience as a nursing student thus far. There have been ups and downs, but as I look back, I wouldn’t change my major for anything. This is my career path, my future, my everything. There is no plan B and there is no other option. I love, live, sleep, and breathe nursing, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty five days of the year.

Nursing is more than just studying, passing exams, and eventually passing your boards. Nursing is a way of mind and it must stem from your heart. You have to want and believe in everything that nursing is from sponge baths to enemas, and catheters to bedpan changes. For me, I have always wanted to work in the medical field; helping people was (and still is) where my heart was. Going into nursing school, I had a full heart that was yearning to learn all there was to learn about nursing. Although I have learned more than I could have ever thought possible in medical knowledge in these last three semesters, here is what I have also learned in nursing school.

1. High school does not prepare you to be a nursing student.

Despite how many times your teachers told you that these study guides, test questions, or practice essays will prepare you for college, they will not. Nursing school is so much more than study guides and essays. You have to have a full understanding, forwards and backwards, of every single topic that you will discuss in class.

2. Not every major requires as much work as others do.

Let me preface this by saying: I DO NOT THINK THAT NURSING IS THE HARDEST MAJOR THERE IS. Do I believe that it is one of the most difficult majors? Yes, I do. I have learned over the last year and a half that some of my friends in other majors seem to have much more free time than I do, and they have to study much less than I do. You just have to accept that the major that you are in does in fact require more effort than others do at times.

3. Having priorities needs to be your number one priority.

This is something that is extremely important to remember throughout nursing school. I had to learn this very quickly as I realized that I would not find success without understanding and clearly defining my priorities and what I wanted from each one.

4. Learning how to say no, even when you don’t want to.

This was something that I severely struggled with, and still do. There is always something you could be doing rather than your school things. You could be at a party, hanging out with friends, watching Netflix, or even on your way home for a family member’s birthday party. But sometimes, you have exams the next day or big projects that are due soon. You have to learn when saying no is the best choice for you, even though you want to be elsewhere.

5. You will get frustrated, and that’s OK.

There are times when you have so much to do and feel so overwhelmed that you just get so angry at anything and everything. Nursing school is extremely difficult, and there will be times where you feel you are at your breaking point. But I promise, you will get through it, and move onto the next frustrating situation. Sometimes it really is just a big cycle of frustration.

6. Taking care of yourself is more important than taking care of others.

There will be times when your friends, who have honestly become your family, are struggling in nursing school. This is a very difficult situation because as a nursing student, your entire goal is to help others. But you have to remember that there is a line between helping others, and getting their degree for them. Make sure that you are focused on getting your degree, rather than getting theirs too.

7. Things will not get easier.

On my first day of nursing orientation, I was told that freshman year is always the hardest due to all of the changes that come along with the transition between high school and college. At the end of my spring semester, I was told that sophomore year is the hardest. Here is my overall conclusion: Things do not get easier, you just learn how to deal with the difficulty.

8. There will be times that you doubt that being a nurse is for you.

Sometimes exams don’t always come back with the grade you expected. This is upsetting, especially after you devoted time and effort into studying for it. After these types of events, you may doubt that nursing is really for you. For some of you, it really may not be. But for situations like this where you are just a little stressed out, I am here to tell you that nursing is still for you, and you will get through this.

9. This will be one of the hardest, yet most exciting times of your life.

As I’ve said multiple times in this article, nursing school is HARD. There will be times where you cry and you get angry, but there are also times when you are crying because you are so excited. This fall, I had the privilege of getting my white coat. This was such an amazing experience, as I really felt like I was finally on my way to becoming a nurse.

10. You have so much to look forward to.

As a freshman in nursing, I always admired how the upperclassmen wore scrubs. As a sophomore in scrubs, I always was jealous of the upperclassmen who were in the hospital with real patients instead of the simulators. In nursing, there is always something bigger, better, and brighter in your future. Whether it is getting your first stethoscope, going to your first clinical, or passing your boards and landing your first job as a nurse. As a nursing student, your future will always be something to look forward to.