Where did the semester go?

I knew it had been a long time since I posted on here, but I was shocked when I clicked onto this page and realized that I haven't added a new post since the semester started. Where did the last three months go?

This has been a very challenging semester for me, for many reasons. It's been really hard for me to get used to a different set of instructors, with different agendas. My grades haven't been all that great, even though I have studied harder this semester than I ever have. I'm having to come to terms with being okay with Cs in my classes, which is hard.

Clinical has been beyond challenging, with an instructor who is so focused on checking us off on certain skills that she makes it not fun at all. We, as students, are focused on patient care and increasing the level of skills that we can perform on the patients. My instructor is focused on getting us all checked off on central line dressing changes so that we don't have to do that skill in the lab at the end of the semester. It's hard to understand how she grades us (when a large part of the rubric consists of how we interact with the patients) and consistently gives us grades much lower than we expect to receive. Needless to say, it's been really frustrating, I haven't enjoyed clinical this semester, and am excited that we only have one more clinical day to go, and we can put this behind us.

Because of all the difficulties we've experienced, my clinical group has grown very close. It's great to have such a wonderful support group, and I don't think I would have made it this far into this semester without them.

We haven't had a holiday since Labor Day, and I was so excited when I realized that my son has the entire week off for Thanksgiving. Not so for me; tomorrow, I have 5.5 hours of lecture, and Wednesday, we have an exam on the material from last week's lecture, as well as what is being covered tomorrow. It's all downhill from here, though. We have clinical December 1st, one more exam December 10th, and our final is December 14th. I can't wait to be able to say that I am 75% finished with nursing school! We found out this week that pinning is May 11th and graduation is either May 13th or 14th. I'll be counting down the days soon.