Hey there! This is Nurse Nicole, founder of Your Nursing Tutor and the VIP Tutoring Membership. Today, I’m resharing one of the 4 most popular podcast episodes of 2021, just in case you missed it. In today’s episode, I’ll be telling you the 3 reasons why otherwise passionate, motivated students who aspire to become nurses…will FAIL.
And I’ll be dispelling the myths that nursing students fail because they’re lazy, or not smart enough, or just not “cut out” to be a nurse…none of those are actually the most common causes that I see for nursing students failing.
And the good news is that the REAL reasons are things that you can take control of and do something about! So you can have hope that it IS possible to improve your grades if you’re already in a situation where you’re failing, or even to make sure that you never have to be in that situation in the first place.
Listen Now!
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Links from Episode 53:
VIP Tutoring Membership (www.YourNursingTutor.com/vip): Get the affordable tutoring support you need to finally transform all your hard work into grades that you can be proud of.
Free Facebook Group: Nursing Students in Nursing School, (Free Help and Support)
Transcript for Episode 53
Hey there! This is Nurse Nicole, founder of Your Nursing Tutor and the VIP Tutoring Membership. Today, I’m resharing one of the 4 most popular podcast episodes of 2021, just in case you missed it. In today’s episode, I’ll be telling you the 3 reasons why otherwise passionate, motivated students who aspire to become nurses…will FAIL.
And I’ll be dispelling the myths that nursing students fail because they’re lazy, or not smart enough, or just not “cut out” to be a nurse…none of those are actually the most common causes that I see for nursing students failing.
And the good news is that the REAL reasons are things that you can take control of and do something about! So you can have hope that it IS possible to improve your grades if you’re already in a situation where you’re failing, or even to make sure that you never have to be in that situation in the first place.
Enjoy today’s episode!
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Today I’m going to answer the question: Why do so many nursing students fail?
Obviously, people go into nursing school because it’s a dream of theirs. Nobody goes to nursing school for fun. Okay?
So if people are so passionate about becoming a nurse, if they’re willing to work hard, and I rarely ever see a lazy nursing student…y’all work hard, guys! I worked hard in nursing school, my classmates did, you guys are, too.
But yet, so many nursing students struggle, so many nursing students fail, so many nursing students go through school just feeling borderline…like they’re never confident that they’re going to make it. And they’re not sure what to do differently.
So why? Why do so many nursing students fail? Well, I can tell you this: I have over 12 years of experience as a professional nursing tutor, I’ve worked with so many nursing students. There are three primary reasons that I see why nursing students fail.
And none of them involve you being lazy or not studying enough. Okay?
First reason that so many nursing students fail is because they don’t think it could happen to them. Okay. So obviously, like I said, they’re passionate. This is their dream. Everybody tells them, they make a natural nurse, they just really want to do it.
So they just assume that if they just work hard, it’s the American dream, right? You work hard, you put in the time, you pay your dues, you’ll reach your goal.
However, that’s not always how it works. Because there are the standardized tests, there’s the exams, there’s basically training your brain to think like a nurse! And that doesn’t naturally happen for everybody.
For a lucky few. It does somehow magically happen. But there’s actually very specific ways you need to study and approach the information that you’re learning in nursing school in order to make your brain learn how to think like a nurse. And unfortunately, most nursing schools don’t teach that way, because they don’t know it.
The second reason why most nursing students fail, or why many nursing students fail, is because they don’t think they have the time or the money to be proactive in the way that they need to be to pass! Or to get the help that they need.
So for example, most nursing schools don’t have a tutor, office hours with the professor kind of hit or miss, it really depends on your professor. And they’re pretty busy too, and they have a whole class to cover, so they are not always able to provide as much help as you need.
And because of this, you’re just kind of scrambling for the next class, “I just need to pass the next test.” Or, “I just need to read this chapter, even though I don’t know how I’m gonna have time.” Because you also have to cook dinner for your family, and maybe get a little bit of sleep because you’re not as young as you used to be, and pay the bills. So maybe you have a job too.
And so you have to be like, time is at a premium! Right? Money is at a premium. You’re paying a lot of money, probably not working as many hours as you would be if you weren’t in nursing school. And so you feel like you’re just trying to keep up with the bare minimum. You don’t have time to go out and seek other help, other than maybe the randomly googled YouTube video, and hopefully that helps, right, but you don’t know for sure.
Hiring a private tutor can be very expensive. When I did one on one tutoring, I had to charge $75 an hour. And I know that’s way out of the reach for a lot of nursing students. So because of this, you tell yourself, “I’ll get it if I need it.” You know, and so they tend to sometimes wait until the last minute, and then it’s unfortunately too late.
Or they have to or you have to go through some really difficult times of failing a class, sitting out a semester, coming back, or maybe retaking NCLEX after a failure. Because you had trouble finding the time to prioritize before you were in that serious of a the problem.
The third reason why so many nursing students fail is because they actually do seek help. This is the reason that really gets to my heart, and why I became a professional nursing tutor is that the students do seek out help, but they can’t find what they need.
And so they keep on looking. They keep on trying to find the help. They look at YouTube videos, they look for blogs, they go to the professor’s office hours, they hang out in Facebook groups for students, but they just can’t get the help they need.
And the problem is that even experienced nurses, even professors, who are well meaning who don’t eat, they’re young, who want to help, they genuinely don’t understand how to help you bridge that gap between being a “soon-to-be-nurse” who doesn’t know how to think like a nurse yet, versus an experienced nurse whose brain just automatically thinks like a nurse.
And so because of that, they often give really, really bad advice that doesn’t work. And they will tell a struggling student, “Study more! Do more practice NCLEX questions!”
However, that advice can actually make things a lot worse, because now you’re just doing more of the wrong thing! Which is obviously not going to help.
And what makes it even more worse than that, is that they keep stringing you along unintentionally, most cases, but they keep stringing you along, because they tell you, “Just keep doing these things, and eventually it’s all going to click.”
However, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to click if you’re studying in the wrong ways like this. If you’re doing the wrong things. You know, it’s like what they say if you keep doing the wrong thing and expect it to change, that’s the definition of crazy, right? If you expect the outcome to change.
So when you’re doing all these things, and nursing school just never clicks for you, then nursing school starts to get harder and harder instead of easier and easier like it should be. Just like any skill that you’re learning, any skill you learn: the more you practice it, it should get easier.
Nursing School is no different, believe it or not. But when you start experiencing this harder and harder, even though you’re doing the things that all the people are telling you, then it starts to make you feel like you’re the problem. That maybe you’re not smart enough to get through nursing school.
But I’m here to tell you that that’s a dirty rotten lie! You ARE smart enough to get through nursing school! Otherwise you wouldn’t have made it into nursing school in the first place. The problem is that you’ve been getting bad advice. Now if you would like to start getting some better advice from a professional nursing tutor who has spent my career acting as a bridge to get nursing students learning how to think like professional nurses, then you will want to take a look at my Your Nursing Tutor VIP Tutoring Membership. And you can find more information about that at www.YourNursingTutor.com/vip
Nicole Whitworth is the founder of Your Nursing Tutor. She has a BSN and an MA in Clinical Psychology, and has been a professional nursing tutor for over 12+ years. Nicole specializes in getting nursing students through school confidently and calmly so that everything finally “clicks”. She is also the creator of the Silver Bullet Study System, an easy-to-follow study method that automatically trains your brain to become a nurse at the same time that you study for your normal nursing classes.