It's a Monday evening only two weeks post midterms and I should be studying.  I'm now in my first semester as a nursing student at the renowned Johns Hopkins.  It gives me great pride to say that I go here and truthfully, it made the work all worth it; the caliber of instruction, the hand-on learning, the accepting, reassuring and nurturing attitude of everyone as high up as the dean down to any admissions or office personnel is wonderful.  The staff get our pictures and memorize our names in the off chance we stop by to say hi and ask a question!  What more could you ask of a school?

Currently I'm in six classes: Principles and Applications, Foundations of Nursing, Trends and Issues, Issues in Aging, Health Assessment and Community Outreach.

P & A is about learning all the basic skills of nursing, the rationale behind them and how to actually do them (i.e. IV's, injections, vital signs, catheters, etc.)

Foundations is about learning the basics of a nursing thought process, coming up with diagnosis, working on interventions and ways to implement them.

T & I is working through the problems we have in the nursing profession, be it not enough money in health care, how to treat everyone equally, recognizing the shortage of nursing and what that will mean for us young nurses.

Issues in Aging is learning about the elderly population; normal and abnormal developmental changes and how to best communicate with elderly patients.

Health Assessment is learning how to do a complete physical, learning the what's normal and what's not so that when we get a sick patient we can assess their symptoms and figure out what's wrong.

And finally, Community Outreach is learning about the greater Baltimore City outside Johns Hopkins.  Learning what the problems are (drugs...lots of them; Baltimore is the heroin capital of the world), how to address them, how we can help and how to protect ourselves.

 Well, that's all for now!

KP