Christina Rafano breaks down three study mistakes nursing students make: no focused plan, too many textbooks, and fear of failure. She recommends prioritizing instructor-emphasized topics, sticking to two or three trusted sources, and using practice questions and concept maps instead of passive reading.
Most nursing students are making some critical mistakes when they study. Are you one of them? If you never know the right things to study and you're stressed and overwhelmed in nursing school, well, then these tips will help. Let's dive in. Mistake number one, not having a study plan and not knowing how to study or even when to start. Now, here's a major problem. In nursing school, you're told to learn everything. Learn the entire textbook before your exams, right? So you read chapter after chapter thinking that you're all prepared for the exam, and then nothing seems to stick. Trust me, if you are feeling this way, you are absolutely not alone. Now, the problem with studying this way is that you will end up learning a little bit about a whole lot of topics. Now, this won't be very helpful for you though, when you get to your nursing exam where they're going to look for not only you understanding the topic topic, but also being able to apply what you've learned, AKA critically thinking about it. So the best way to focus your studying so you actually have time to actually learn it and apply it, is to focus on the topics that your instructor talks about in class. I hear this over and over and over again from our nursing students. Your instructors will primarily test you on the topics they covered in class. So really pay attention to what they are focusing on in lecture. Then go back through and read about those topics. Read to learn. And then once you've learned it, take it one step further and apply it, right? Do practice questions, teach it to someone else. Make a concept map for it, apply it. So trust me, my friend, this will help you focus your studying. Make it so much more effective for your next nursing school exam. Do not spend all of your time reading the book just for the sake of reading the book. This is a huge waste of time. And if you are doing this right now, you are not studying efficiently, okay? So focus on studying the things that your instructor covered in lecture class. That is what's most likely to show up on your exam. Now, mistake number two that we see nursing students make all the time is they are drowning in textbooks. Now, this isn't your fault. You recognize that there's a lot to learn in nursing school, right? So having more resources to learn it might make it easier. Or at least that's what we hear from other nursing students, that they are just trying to make sure that they don't miss anything or they have, you know, five resources ready to learn about the topic and they just don't want to have anything left out. Now, this goes back to mistake number one, if you were trying to learn everything about everything, you will actually spend so much time learning a little bit about a whole lot of things. And like we already talked about, that will not be helpful for you on your nursing school exams because you need to know how to critically think about it. So stick with two or three trusted resources. One that goes over the topic of very high level so that you understand it and then the other one to really break it down further so that you are able to understand it thoroughly and critically think about it, but not too much that you're just like spiraling down the rabbit hole of trying to know everything about everything. Trust me, if you feel like you are drowning in too many things to learn from all different directions, try narrowing it down. Narrow down your resources to one or two trusted ones and it will help you really focus your studying and then dive deeper into the topic. Now I also have a free cheat sheet with even more study tips for you so you can download that after you watch this video. I'm going to put the link to that cheat sheet in the description box below for you. Now this next common mistake might just be the biggest problem we see nursing students facing. They don't feel like they can get through nursing school. They are afraid of failing, so they take their foot off the gas and then they don't study as much as they should and then they they end up not doing as well on the exam as they wanted to. This is seriously one of the biggest problems that I help nursing students overcome. And let me be super straight with you. You must overcome this fear of failure if you want to be successful in nursing school and honestly, life in general, right? But here's the thing. This holds true for every aspect of life. I wouldn't learn as much if I hadn't failed in the past, right? So shifting what how you're thinking, shifting how you're thinking about failure and what you def as failure is key here. So you have two options, really. You can let failure knock you down and you can leave nursing school feeling defeated. Or you can pick yourself back up, learn from it, and keep going. And friend, I really, really pray that you keep going. Because the only way to get to where you want to go is to fight for it every single day. And that will require you to show up for yourself. Stop using failure as an excuse and stress and overwhelm as an excuse and keep moving forward. There's no way around it. Failure is not optional. It's going to happen. But using it as an excuse as to why you can't succeed and pass. Nursing school is optional, so do not do that to yourself, okay? You are worth more than that, and the world needs you. So stand back up. Make it happen. I know you have it in you to keep going. And if you're stressing about your next exam, be sure to watch this video to find out the three things that you need to know to pass your exams. Now go. Become the nurse that God created only you to be, and I'll see you over there in that next video.
