Advisement Advice

For the second and third semesters of nursing school, the junior class will get split in half. One half doing this set of classes and the other doing another. The classes will switch for the third semester. The choices the juniors face is whether to do medical surgical nursing and psychiatric nursing first or to do obstetrics, pediatrics and older adult nursing first.

I personally chose to do the med-surg and psych half first for a couple of reasons. One I am very interested in pursuing a career in the obstetric world, therefore, I wanted to save those clinicals last. I planned my clinical groups to purposefully have the ob clinicals last and at Freeman. When I was doing the med-surg semester, I choose to do those clinicals the first half of the semester and the pscyh clincials the second half. Mainly because med-surg ones are more days and longer days then the psych ones. I wanted to end my semester with the less time consuming of the two clinicals. I really felt like this benefited my schedule. It helped me to have extra time during the week to do projects and to stay caught up my school work.

Another reason, I choose to do my med-surg/psych semester first was because the drugs we learned about in med-surg matched up with the pharmacology class that all the juniors take. Now this does not apply to this groups class. My year takes two pharm classes: one second semester and one third. The year below me will be taking one class that is the combination of the two of mine. I have not gotten a straight answer of which semester this class will be in for them, but my suggestion is to do med-surg that semester.

Either way you do it, you will complete all the classes. Some of my classmate are in med-surg now so that they have the material fresh for when you take advanced med-surg in your fourth semester of nursing school. This has worked well for them, but they struggled through pharm last semester compared to us who were in med-surg then.

Obstetrics and Pediatrics

VS.

Psyciatric and Medical Surgical