Nursing School Study Tips for Finals Exams

You worried about passing your final exams in nursing school? Don't be. I've got you, my friend. In this video, we're going to talk through my top nursing school study tips for passing your final exams. Let's do it now. Before we get started on talking about final exams, I want to make sure that you know about this free study checklist that I have for you that walks you through how to study in nursing school. It's going to be such a great resource for you so you can get my best study tips. You know what to focus on when you study, so be sure to download that. The link is in the description below this video. So comprehensive final exams in nursing school can be quite overwhelming to be honest, because you have all of your regular exams throughout the term and then at the end of the term you're tested on all of it, right? A little bit stressful to say the least. Because you have to remember all the things you learned from week one and week two and week three and everything. You're going to be tested on all of it when it comes to your comprehensive final exams at the end of the term. So when you are preparing for finals, you really want to start two weeks before your final exams are. So start studying two weeks before you have to go take your final. That will give you enough time to really make sure that you know the information that you've learned throughout the term and can remember it for your finals. We don't want to be in a position where we are cramming the night before, right? Because that's really not helpful for you, especially on a comprehensive final when there is just so much information to know and remember, right? So try to give yourself at least two weeks ahead of time to start studying. Studying for your finals. So let's talk about exactly how to study for final exams now. Don't worry if you are within that two week period already. Let's say you have one week left or just a few days left. That's okay. Let's walk through these six step process for studying for your comprehensive finals. I'll give you an exact step by step study plan to follow so that you can succeed on your final exams. But my friend, start now, okay? Don't put it off. Don't procrastinate. If you have a final exam coming up in nursing school, you need to get ready. You need to start now. So let's walk through the six step process to make that happen. So the first step, super important, please do not skip this. You have to collect all of your Notes from the term. Collect them from your kitchen, from your dining room, from your bedroom, from your car, from everywhere, okay? Check everywhere. Make sure you have all of the notes from your term so that you can use them to study. Have I told you this story that happened to me and why this is a legitimate step in this process? Because I actually got to one of my med surg. I think it was Med Surg 3 exams and it was on neurological disorders and sensory disorders apparently. So when I got to the exam, I thought that I had studied really, really well for it. It was on neurodisorders. I had studied all of that and it was great. I got to the exam and literally like half of the exam I was not prepared for. I had not studied for it. I was like, where is this coming from? I literally had forgotten to study half of my. Not the sensory disorder part. Who knew? Because those notes, they were just not even around. Like, I did not. I did not even look at them. I didn't even know where they were. Not helpful. So I do not want that to happen to you. Okay? So make sure that before you start studying for your finals that you have everything. It sounds so simple, it sounds so dumb, but make sure that you know everything. Like you have all of your material from that term and you're not missing anything accidentally, like I did. Don't do that to yourself. Now step number two is to organize your notes by week of the term or the topic. Whatever really works best for you. So when I was in nursing school, how my classes were pretty much structured was that like week one we would study a particular topic. Let's say it was cardiac. And then week two we would study respiratory. And the week three we would study endocrine or something like that. So you can break it up by week if you want, or you can break it up by topic. For me, I really like to break it up by week because that was kind of automatically breaking my notes up by topic. But do what works best for you. What we want here is to make sure that you are taking that huge stack of notes that you have from everything through the term, right? It's going to be big, it's going to be a thick packet, right? You're going to have a lot of notes from your term. We want to break that up into smaller bite sized pieces for you to focus your study time on. You don't want to look at this massive pile of notes, this massive binder, right? And get overwhelmed about it. That's not what we want. Okay? We want to break up our notes into smaller bite sized pieces so that you can study a chunk at a time. Like study one at a time. So break up that big packet notes. Remember you collected everything, all of your notes in step number one. And now we have this big packet of notes. We're breaking it up into smaller chunks for you to focus on one at a time. So break those up by week of the term if that works for you, or by topic of whatever you were studying that term. So break up that big packet of notes by week or by topic. And now step number three is you are going to go through one packet at a time and highlight, use a highlighter. The notes that you can't remember or you don't yet know. Now this is so important. As you go through your packets of notes, you want to make sure that you are focusing on highlighting the information that you don't know or you can't remember. We want to make sure that we are only focusing our study time on the things that you don't know yet. It is so easy in nursing school to get caught up on rereading or restudying the things that we already know. But the thing is, is obviously that's not helpful for you, right? We don't want to just focus our study time on things that we already know, even though it makes us good. Like it makes you feel good that you actually know something, but it's a waste of time, right? Because you already know that stuff. So make sure that you go through each packet of notes one at a time. Highlight the things that you don't yet know or you can't remember. So let's say that these are my notes from my term in nursing school, which is kind of funny because these are literally my notes that I took in nursing school. So let's say I'm studying for finals and this is one packet that I'm studying. Okay? So I would highlight. Use a highlighter. I would highlight the information that I don't yet know or can't remember. So let's say I didn't know this, that I would just highlight this. Okay? So that is. Now step number three. Highlight the notes that you can't remember or you don't yet know. All right? Now step number four is to take a blank piece of paper and rewrite the notes that you highlighted onto a separate sheet of paper. You want a clean slate here, my friend? Like get everything else out, right? Rewrite it all onto another sheet of paper. And that is what you are going to focus on now here's where you're going to get stuck, because I got stuck on this, and pretty much everyone I know gets stuck on this. When you do this process, when you rewrite your highlighted notes from here, the things that you can't remember, right throughout the term, when you rewrite that onto a separate sheet of paper, you're going to have a lot of paper. That's okay. Don't freak out, okay? Because what your brain's going to do is your brain's going to tell you that you don't know anything and this is impossible, and you can't possibly remember and study all these things before your final exam. Don't listen to your brain, okay? You can absolutely do this, my friend. You know more than you think you do. You really, really do trust yourself, okay? You have learned this stuff through the term. Just because you need a refresher on it, just because you can't remember it, just because you had to highlight it and rewrite it here on this paper, it doesn't mean that you can't learn it before your final exam. You absolutely can, okay? So don't listen to your brain freaking out. It's going to be okay. Even if you a lot to study, it's going to be fine. You know more than you think you do. I promise you. And so once you have written your notes all on all these blank sheets of paper, so these are filled with the things that you are now going to study for your final exams for nursing school, right? These are all the things that you don't yet know or can't remember from your term, right? These are the things you're going to focus on for your finals. Once that is done, then you are going to study it. Use concept maps, write flashcards. Study in the way that you know best, okay? Teach someone else. We always talk about this inside our nursing SOS Membership community. Teach someone else. That is such a great way to remember the information, but study in the way that works best for you, okay? So make sure that whatever you have written here on these multiple sheets of paper, the things that you can't remember from your term, right? Everything you have written here, study it, okay? Rewrite your notes. Make flashcards, do concept maps, draw pictures. Teach someone else. Study in the way that you study best. And then once you have done that and feel pretty comfortable, then you're going to repeat the process again, okay? You're going to take these notes that you have studied and you're going to highlight the things that you still need a refresher on. The things that you still need to really study and focus on and think about, okay? So highlight that information that you still don't yet know, you don't have a super solid understanding of, and then you're going to rewrite it onto a new sheet of paper. So you just do the process again. So this is now step number six. Repeat the process. Highlight the notes that you had written that you had studied, and highlight the things that you don't yet know and can't remember. Repeat that process, okay? Highlight them again and rewrite them onto a blank sheet of paper. So then you can study that again. You want to repeat the process until maybe you get down to maybe one sheet of paper, or it's a very, very small amount of things that you need to study. Now, the key here, here's why we do it this way, my friend. The key really is to that you are focusing your study time on the things that you don't yet know. Because like I said, it is so easy to get caught up in studying the things that you already know about, right? Because it makes you feel good. You get that dopamine hit, right? It makes you feel like you know something in nursing school. But it's not an efficient way to study for your finals, right? Because we want to study the things that we don't know yet, the things that we actually have to know for our exam that we're going to be tested on. So make sure that you are following the A six step process. Follow those steps exactly so that you can be prepared for your finals. Now, did you know that there are three things that you are absolutely going to be tested on for your final exams in nursing school? And pretty much any exam that you take, like, these are the three things that you have to know in order to pass your finals. So click on this video here and I'm going to walk you through exactly what those three things are and how to study them so you can pass your final exams and go become the nurse that God created only you to be. And I will see you over there in that next video.