How to PREPARE FOR FINALS in Nursing School

In this video, we are going to walk through the step by step process for how to study for your final exams in nursing school. Seriously, friend, I'm going to break this process down for you step by step so you can follow it exactly to rock your exams in nursing school. This is the exact process that I use in nursing school to help me get straight A's, and I'm going to share it all with you right here in this video. Now hit that subscribe button and click the notification bell and let's dive in. So one of the biggest questions that I get asked from nursing students is, Christina, how far in advance do I need to start studying for my finals? And honestly, I want you to start studying for your finals on day one of nursing school. Like that nursing school term, that first day, I want you to start studying for your finals. Study a little bit every single day, and you will be so much more prepared for your final exams when they come around. Now, if you're not studying a little bit every day right now, I want to change that at least two weeks before your final exam. That's my kind of second answer to this. If you haven't really been studying up until this point, make sure that you really start focusing on studying for your final exams at least two weeks before. Now, that should give you enough time to really prepare for those finals. So let's walk through the step by step process that you can do in those two weeks leading up to your final exam. Now, the first step of this process is to go around your house, around your car, around everywhere you can think of and collect all of your notes from that class or the classes that you have your finals in. Seriously, how is it that notes and textbooks and PowerPoint slides and everything, it just gets put in random places? Everything gets super disorganized by the end of the term, right? So you've got to go around your car, your kitchen table, maybe even your bedroom, your office and your house. Anywhere that could have notes or textbooks or anything that you need to study. Collection everything into one place. That's step number one. Because if you don't do this, friend, you might miss something. You don't want to leave out a section of notes and not study for them for your final and then come to find out that they end up being on your final exam. So make sure that you're looking everywhere around your environment. In your car, in your house, in your locker, at school, maybe just find all of your notes so that you are prepared for when you start studying. Now, the second step to this process is to organize your notes into packets and what I call packets. So I use binder clips for this, this little guy here, there are smaller ones, but because there's so many notes in nursing school, let's be honest, we're going to get the big one, the big guys. So what you're going to do is you're going to, after you've collect all your notes, you are going to organize them into packets. So put sections of notes together based on subject or topic. So let's say you're studying in a term, cardiac, respiratory and renal. In a med surg class, you would put all the cardiac packets, all of your notes on cardiac into one packet and then you're gonna bind or clip them together just like that. Same thing for like respiratory. Put all your respiratory notes together. Put all your renal notes together. If you're studying PEDs and OB in one term, then you would put all your peds not together or all your OB notes together. See what I'm saying? Organize them by topic or by subject. And that will just really help to take the massive amount of notes that you have collected through the term and break them up into smaller chunks. It's a lot easier to study and a lot easier to manage when you have smaller packets to study at a time rather than looking at a huge stack of paper, papers and notes and stuff that you have to study before your final. So that is why we break it up that way. I want you to focus on studying one packet at a time. So step two, make sure that you divide up your notes into packets by subject. Now, after you've divided up your notes by subject into separate packets, you are going to take one at a time, one packet at a time, and you're going to use a highlighter and you are going to highlight, go through each packet and highlight the things that you do not yet know or cannot remember. Now here's the key to this friend you absolutely have to constrain yourself on to highlighting the things that you don't know or you can't remember. Do not highlight things through your notes that you already know or that you're pretty good at and have a good understanding of. What we want to do here is only highlight the things that you have forgotten, can't quite remember and need a refresher on and do not freak out during this process. Trust me, it's going to be a lot and that's totally okay. Do not worry because by the end of this process you are going to know all of it. So Go through each packet one by one and highlight the things that you do not yet know. Now, step number four is to take everything that you highlighted, only the things that you highlighted, because remember, those are the things that you don't know yet. And you are going to rewrite them onto a separate sheet of paper. Just a blank sheet of paper. Now again, don't freak out because, friend, it genuinely, genuinely might take you multiple pieces of paper. It might be a little overwhelming. But fight that. I don't want you to get overwhelmed because trust me, by the end of this step by step process, you will know all of this. So for now, just take what you have highlighted on your notes, the things you don't know, and transfer them, Rewrite them onto a separate sheet of paper, a blank sheet of paper. So this will end up being sheets of paper of only the things that you don't know or can't remember from throughout the term. So that is step number four. Now, before we get to step number five, I want to give a shout out to our YouTube comment of the week, which comes from Maureen. And it says, I needed this video. I'm having a hard time in med surg, but I know I can turn it around. Thank you for the video. So nice. Maureen, thank you so much. And you guys, seriously, your comments make my week. My month even. I love reading all of your comments every week. They really are a light in my life and they make me smile. And not only do they tell YouTube that our videos are super awesome and more nursing students should see them and it helps expand our reach so that I can help more nursing students. That's pretty cool. But also, like I said, I just really like them and I like getting to know you, so they really make me smile. Thank you so much. Now, so far in this process, you have gone throughout your entire house and your entire life and you have collected all of your notes into one place. You've organized them into packets based on topic, and you have highlighted the things in those packets that you don't yet know. So focus on the things that you don't know. And you have transferred the things that you don't yet know. You've rewrote it on a separate sheet of paper. So now the next step is to study what is in these sheets of paper. Not the original packets, only the things. Focus on only the things that are on these sheets of paper because these are the things that you don't yet know and can't remember from throughout the term. There is no point in going back to These big packets because you will know some stuff in here. I want you to focus your time on studying the things that you don't know yet. So study them. Make flashcards, write and rewrite things on a whiteboard. Draw concepts out, whatever you need to do to help make sure that this information sinks in before your final exam. Now, as you're studying for your final exams, do not forget to download the nursing school study checklist that we have for you that walks you through, step by step, how to focus your study time to make sure that you're studying the right things. I'll put a link down below in this video. And of course, if you are a nursing SOS member, be sure to log into your dashboard, flip through the courses that we have, find the video that is most applicable for what you're studying. If you're studying cardiac, make sure to check out our cardiac course. If you're studying studying renal, make sure to check out our renal course or GI or endocrine or fundamentals or fluid electrolytes. It's all there for you. So whatever you're studying in nursing school, make sure that you go log into your dashboard and watch the videos to help you out. And now step number six is to grab your highlighter once again and highlight the things that you don't yet know. After you've done. After you're done studying all of these things, you will know a lot of it. Now you're gonna go through it again. Same thing that we did with the original pattern packets, gonna go through these sheets of paper and highlight the things that you still don't yet know. And then you're gonna repeat the process, transfer those to a new sheet of paper, rewrite everything that you highlighted here onto a separate sheet of paper. And then now each time you do this, you are going to decrease the number of pages that you have because you're gonna learn more and more and more through this process. By the time your finals come around, you should not have any pieces of paper or it might just be like a little bit on a page, that's totally fine. But for the most part, you are really going to know everything. So give yourself at least two weeks to do this step by step process. You will be golden. Now in the next video, I'm going to walk you through how to use the drug guide in nursing school to learn your meds faster. Seriously friend, there are a ton of pharmacology hacks that you can do in nursing school to help learn pharmacology and your medications way faster. And way easier. And we're gonna walk through exactly how to do that in the next video. So make sure that you're subscribed to this channel and that you've clicked the notification bell, because trust me, friend, you do not want to miss that one. Now click on one of these videos right here so you can keep rocking nursing school and, as always, go become the nurse that God created only you to be. Now, catch you in the next video. Take care, friend. Bye.