The Fora: A Higher Education Community

Quote from: AmLitHist on January 25, 2025, 01:03:25 PMFrom a student's post to an introduction discussion board:

I am taking 4 classes to get me started on my nursing degree. I have a really weird phobia of blood and will faint when i see it . When i went to get my wisdom teeth removed over my spring break junior year I passed out.

Um . . . does she actually know what nurses do?

She knows that they have secure jobs for as long as it takes for them to marry an M.D. and "retire" to manage the house, hubby, kids, and social lives of all of them.  She is hoping that this will happen quite quickly!

Quote from: Thursday's_Child on January 25, 2025, 01:33:50 PM

Quote from: AmLitHist on January 25, 2025, 01:03:25 PMFrom a student's post to an introduction discussion board:

I am taking 4 classes to get me started on my nursing degree. I have a really weird phobia of blood and will faint when i see it . When i went to get my wisdom teeth removed over my spring break junior year I passed out.

Um . . . does she actually know what nurses do?

She knows that they have secure jobs for as long as it takes for them to marry an M.D. and "retire" to manage the house, hubby, kids, and social lives of all of them.  She is hoping that this will happen quite quickly!

May be just a little unfair to the student...but yeah, she's heard that nursing is a great thing to get into and not making the connection with what nursing would actually entail.  Maybe she's convinced herself that there are nursing jobs of some kind that don't involve blood?  Maybe she thinks that, say, pediatric nurses don't ever have to see blood?  Or maybe she's just very optimistic about her ability to get beyond her blood phobia?

Reminds me of somebody years ago on the old Fora talking about a student who was in a nursing program and yet was so timid that she had her mother negotiating with the prof on her behalf.  Another student who apparently thought that nursing sounded good in the abstract, without really ever thinking about what it would actually involve.

Quote from: AmLitHist on January 25, 2025, 01:03:25 PMFrom a student's post to an introduction discussion board:

I am taking 4 classes to get me started on my nursing degree. I have a really weird phobia of blood and will faint when i see it . When i went to get my wisdom teeth removed over my spring break junior year I passed out.

Um . . . does she actually know what nurses do?

She might not know that nurses are the ones who clean up the "gross things" in medicine.  There are lots of medical careers that don't involve seeing blood like radiology, family services, occupational therapy, and accounting.  Does your school have a medical career advising center?  Stu needs to learn about other jobs!

Quote from: apl68 on January 27, 2025, 07:43:58 AMMaybe she's convinced herself that there are nursing jobs of some kind that don't involve blood? 

Forensic Pathology?

Quote from: the_geneticist on January 27, 2025, 08:04:47 AM

Quote from: AmLitHist on January 25, 2025, 01:03:25 PMFrom a student's post to an introduction discussion board:

I am taking 4 classes to get me started on my nursing degree. I have a really weird phobia of blood and will faint when i see it . When i went to get my wisdom teeth removed over my spring break junior year I passed out.

Um . . . does she actually know what nurses do?

She might not know that nurses are the ones who clean up the "gross things" in medicine.  There are lots of medical careers that don't involve seeing blood like radiology, family services, occupational therapy, and accounting.  Does your school have a medical career advising center?  Stu needs to learn about other jobs!

And that's the thing--so many college-bound youths seem to have very limited ideas of what's out there, especially if they don't come from a well-educated background to start with.  It may be that the student has heard that STEM is where all the jobs are.  And what STEM jobs has she heard of?  Maybe only "scientist" ("Well, I'm not interested in science, and maybe I'm not smart enough for that"), "doctor" ("Definitely way too hard to think about going into!"), and "nurse" ("Hey, you get to help people, and maybe even work with kids!").  So "nurse" it is. 

Yes, counseling is definitely needed to help the students be aware that there's more out there.  But it still has to be an uphill struggle for the counselors.  Our local HS has a conscientious guidance counselor who tries to work with the students, and yet the great majority of our college-bound students still only seem to be able to imagine going into one of about half a dozen fields.  The most popular of which by far is--"nurse."  Maybe as many as a third of them in some years want to be nurses, and I know from things I've heard here at The Fora that most of them will never make it.  Well, hopefully some of those would-be nurses who wash out when they learn about the whole icky blood thing will find out along the way that they can be things like radiologists, accountants, etc.

Quote from: apl68 on January 27, 2025, 09:04:04 AM

Quote from: the_geneticist on January 27, 2025, 08:04:47 AM

Quote from: AmLitHist on January 25, 2025, 01:03:25 PMFrom a student's post to an introduction discussion board:

I am taking 4 classes to get me started on my nursing degree. I have a really weird phobia of blood and will faint when i see it . When i went to get my wisdom teeth removed over my spring break junior year I passed out.

Um . . . does she actually know what nurses do?

She might not know that nurses are the ones who clean up the "gross things" in medicine.  There are lots of medical careers that don't involve seeing blood like radiology, family services, occupational therapy, and accounting.  Does your school have a medical career advising center?  Stu needs to learn about other jobs!

And that's the thing--so many college-bound youths seem to have very limited ideas of what's out there, especially if they don't come from a well-educated background to start with.  It may be that the student has heard that STEM is where all the jobs are.  And what STEM jobs has she heard of?  Maybe only "scientist" ("Well, I'm not interested in science, and maybe I'm not smart enough for that"), "doctor" ("Definitely way too hard to think about going into!"), and "nurse" ("Hey, you get to help people, and maybe even work with kids!").  So "nurse" it is. 

Yes, counseling is definitely needed to help the students be aware that there's more out there.  But it still has to be an uphill struggle for the counselors.  Our local HS has a conscientious guidance counselor who tries to work with the students, and yet the great majority of our college-bound students still only seem to be able to imagine going into one of about half a dozen fields.  The most popular of which by far is--"nurse."  Maybe as many as a third of them in some years want to be nurses, and I know from things I've heard here at The Fora that most of them will never make it.  Well, hopefully some of those would-be nurses who wash out when they learn about the whole icky blood thing will find out along the way that they can be things like radiologists, accountants, etc.

A decade or so back when my youngest kid graduated from high school, I noted that the most common things students were planning to study in university were "English" and "Psychology". I think, as noted above, those were simply things students knew about, but had no real deep idea of what their options were, and doing what lots of others are doing must be OK, right?

It's just the way it is when you're young and "don't know what you want to be when you grow up."  The average person only seems to be aware of a limited number of desirable-sounding career options, and that's where the students are mostly heading, now that the pressure to hit the ground running with a lucrative career is so acute.  Most find out the hard way that they can't be whatever those few desirable careers are.  Somewhere along the way they have to figure out a plan B or C.  For a great many students, college is where that takes place.

It must be hardest for those who've gone through K-12 without ever learning much of anything or developing any useful skills.  They're pretty much stuck with the lowest of low-wage, usually part-time work.  They can try to go to a vo-tech school and learn a trade, but that takes money  and a modicum of functional literacy and numeracy.  I've heard of trade-school students who must struggle mightily to learn a trade because they never mastered the basics in high school.  Where I live you've also got lots and lots of young women who go into hairdressing and such.  The beauty schools aren't academically demanding, and it's apparently just about the only thing not involving being an entertainment star that seems at all desirable to them.  They mostly end up cutting hair at somebody else's shop for minimum wage, if they can get a job in the crowded field at all.

So many of our students *think* they want a job in medicine. "I want to help people & support my family".  But there are so many other good jobs that check those boxes - many don't even need a college degree.  Or you don't need to go to medical school.  Go into business management or accounting or chemistry!

We have so many students who are being pressured into choosing "go to medical school", but they don't have the support they need to do well in foundational classes. They are often commuters, with jobs off campus, and families that pressure them to be available to take relatives to appointments or care for siblings.  The message "you need to go to class to pass" needs an addendum of "not all learning is in the classroom".  Join a club, find study buddies, make connections in the campus community.
You aren't getting into medical school if you fail out of intro bio.

Quote from: the_geneticist on January 27, 2025, 08:04:47 AM

Quote from: AmLitHist on January 25, 2025, 01:03:25 PMFrom a student's post to an introduction discussion board:

I am taking 4 classes to get me started on my nursing degree. I have a really weird phobia of blood and will faint when i see it . When i went to get my wisdom teeth removed over my spring break junior year I passed out.

Um . . . does she actually know what nurses do?

She might not know that nurses are the ones who clean up the "gross things" in medicine.  There are lots of medical careers that don't involve seeing blood like radiology, family services, occupational therapy, and accounting.  Does your school have a medical career advising center?  Stu needs to learn about other jobs!

I will say, I sent that student's sentence to my sister, who's been a nurse since 1971 (yes, we're both dinosaurs). This is the same sister who talked our younger daughter out of becoming an RN by saying, "Get ready to spend a lot of your working life getting puked on, splattered with blood and poop, and wiping people's butts." She spent many years nursing in ER, OR, and cardiac units at a major nationally-known hospital, many of those as head/charge nurse, and she knows whereof she speaks.

She said that comments like this student's are what drove her out of hospital work the last 10 years of her career. She had far too many new nurses coming to her during a shift and saying, "I can't clean [whatever] up. It makes me sick!" or "Can I switch rooms with another nurse? I don't like to [change dressings, monitor GI tubes, et al.]." Knowing my sister, I'm pretty sure they said those things to her once, and only once. She finally switched to home IV care instead (and still did plenty of the other dirty work in those settings, too).

ALHS's mom was hospitalized over the holiday with a sudden severe intestinal blockage and was extremely sick and scared - she's 94, and her last time being hospitalized was in 1959 when ALHS was born. In the Big Hospital she got transferred to, the two young nurses kept chatting about how they hated doing the various parts of MIL's treatment, and how each had seen similar cases that went badly wrong and the patients died, in great disgusting detail - all this in MIL's room, where all of us could hear. I listened for about 2 minutes, then went on the warpath to the charge nurse who hauled both of them out, took over MIL's hands-on care herself (and was very kind). She later proceeded to rip both of the young nurses to shreds for their lack of compassion, poor bedside manner, and lack of professionalism (which I heard as I was sitting in the family lounge across from the DoN's office). The charge nurse later apologized to us profusely, and we had only really good nurses for the rest of her week there.

Yikes, ALH.

I was once watching my nephew and he announced he cut himself and was bleeding, see? "Ew" I said, "Let's get you a band-aid but I don't like blood."

"Aunt Ciao, don't you know your whole body is FULL of blood?"

Yes, kid, and that's where it stays. Sealed away.

Quote from: apl68 on January 27, 2025, 07:43:58 AM

Quote from: Thursday's_Child on January 25, 2025, 01:33:50 PM

Quote from: AmLitHist on January 25, 2025, 01:03:25 PMFrom a student's post to an introduction discussion board:

I am taking 4 classes to get me started on my nursing degree. I have a really weird phobia of blood and will faint when i see it . When i went to get my wisdom teeth removed over my spring break junior year I passed out.

Um . . . does she actually know what nurses do?

She knows that they have secure jobs for as long as it takes for them to marry an M.D. and "retire" to manage the house, hubby, kids, and social lives of all of them.  She is hoping that this will happen quite quickly!

May be just a little unfair to the student...but yeah, she's heard that nursing is a great thing to get into and not making the connection with what nursing would actually entail.  Maybe she's convinced herself that there are nursing jobs of some kind that don't involve blood?  Maybe she thinks that, say, pediatric nurses don't ever have to see blood?  Or maybe she's just very optimistic about her ability to get beyond her blood phobia?

Reminds me of somebody years ago on the old Fora talking about a student who was in a nursing program and yet was so timid that she had her mother negotiating with the prof on her behalf.  Another student who apparently thought that nursing sounded good in the abstract, without really ever thinking about what it would actually involve.

Yes, very possibly unfair to the student - but it's an attitude that I've seen so often, for so long, that I do tend to jump that conclusion pretty quickly.

Agreed that a frank discussion and some investigation of alternative careers would be the most positive response.