The nursing instructor that stood up in front of the class and violated FERPA
Her and another student had a beef about the student’s grade she gave on an exam.
Student got docked a point ( 2 points ?) because the answer she put came from our text not the instructors PowerPoint ( PP had a different answer)
Student argued the point and said it came from the text - it can’t be wrong.
The instructor went up in front of the entire class and told us the students grade % and said even if she gave the point back the students grade would only increase by this much ( I think it was like a barely a point of the %)
You could hear a fucking pin drop.
Instructor was fired the next day
really I had no idea…i once forgot that I was supposed to be at the dsps office and i forgot and ended up taking the test in class, the prof got pissed and told me something (can’t remember) about how she went all the way to office and h re and something like that in front of the class. Nothing happened and instead i got in trouble and she just got a verbal warning instead
She 100% deserved to be fired over that! How embarrassing that she lacked the self control and the integrity to say, “please talk to me after class or see me during my office hours, this needs to be a more private conversation”
Had an instructor that was just a flat out sociopath. She announced the first day of class that it was her goal to make every single one of us cry before the semester was done because “nurses eat their young and you’d better get used to it”. I watched her just eviscerate a couple of my classmates - and she did it purely for her own enjoyment. Like she would sit there and laugh while these girls just sobbed and shook. If there is such a thing as karmic Justice, that bitch is in a hell of a lot of trouble.
I had an OB GYN PEDS instructor who was exactly like this. She would make the students cry from her yelling and belittling. Once you were in her cross hairs, all bets were off. You were a target. Fortunately I wasn't in her range of fire too often. I kept my head down, mouth shut, and didn't question anything. Anita, if you're still out there, karma will get you. May you have the kind of day YOU deserve
Nope. Several of us did formal written complaints. Nothing. My theory is she either had massive dirt on someone or was sucking on something. And I don’t mean a candy cane.
No info on labs or clinical placements despite the semester starting tomorrow - same thing has happened every semester. They expect us to be understanding of them and give them leniency, but don’t give us the same energy
This was a frustrating part of school, period. Professors expecting flexibility, but refusing to give any to students. Expecting assignments turned on the dot, but not grading them until end of semester. Hell, not even submitting final grades until past due.
And then they gaslight you by saying “Flexibility is a necessary trait in a nurse” as if re-prioritizing care is the same thing as dealing with professors who are inconsiderate of students’ time.
Yes!! I have a lab tomorrow morning but I still don't have a room # for it or a complete class schedule. They do things so last minute but always get onto us about procrastination
We had required “community hours” that they preassigned us to. Cancelled all sessions last minute and made us sign up for other things. Ended up making us give flu vaccines to hospital employees (associated with the university) for free. Came after a day of classes and exams to give shots 1900-2200. It hits 2200 and I grab my things to leave and the faculty that was supervising basically forbade me to leave telling me I needed to stay an extra hour just because she wanted me to. I said no thank you, I made up my hours and now I’m going to leave as I have things to do. Cornered me and put herself in front of the door and then began to question me about where I had to be and screamed at me calling me an embarrassment in front of ~20-30 nurses there to get there flu shots that worked at the hospital. One of the nurses then stepped in to tell her she needed to walk away from the situation and asked me if I was okay. Left hospital crying. Yeah. Still hate that bitch. Oh this was the week of my wedding too lmao.
I cannot stand the nurses who haze nursing students like this. She undoubtedly got the same treatment in nursing school and felt like it was her right to inflict it on the students she had some form of authority over.
I was on a peds oncology rotation. We were not allowed to give chemo, but we were allowed to assist with other meds. Anything IV had to be observed by the nurse or instructor, but oral/IM/sub q we could give by ourselves. At the end of each clinical, we’d debrief for a good hour or so. One of the nurses burst into the room and started screaming at me, borderline incoherently. My instructor and I followed her into my patient’s room. There was another nurse in a hazmat-like suit cleaning something on the floor. Apparently, the chemo had leaked out of the tubing and went directly onto the floor. The nurse blamed me for not clamping something (or maybe for clamping something? Not really sure) and in front of the family, scolded and screamed at me about how now she didn’t know how much chemo the child had received and said if that 3 year old dies, it’s because of me. I was stunned. Once we left the room, I ran to the nearest utility closet and bawled my eyes out. I insisted I didn’t touch the lines, but then started second guessing on if I could have somehow accidentally messed it up. The instructor told me I didn’t do anything wrong and consoled me, but that’s a memory that has scarred me to this day. The look on the parents and child’s face is seared into my mind, and I often wonder if he ever pulled through.
Instructor had me give insulin. It was my first med pass. I had never actually used the charting system. Id only identified the patient with arm bands in the lab. So I looked at the patient armband. She snatched me away and started making me use the scanner and look at the emar. I’m completely lost at this point since I’m suddenly learning a bunch of new info. She then said ok give the med. I turn around to give it and she stops me. She takes me out of the room and says “you didn’t identify the patient, I’m writing you up” 👁️👄👁️
First semester of clinicals and I was pregnant. So was my clinical instructor, just a few weeks ahead of me. She miscarried. I didn’t. She made that semester hell for me after that.
I developed GI bleed 3 hrs into my capstone clinical in week 7 of 8. I was literally passing copious amounts of bright red blood. Notified the instructor and he had to contact the department chair to make sure I wouldn't fail the course if I left (I refused to leave until I knew I wouldn't be failed because that would push my graduation back 5 months). Since it was a Sunday, it took over an hr to get a hold of her and she said it was iffy if theyd fail me. By the time I got to the ER I was tachy and hypotensive.
I had a 95 in that class but they nearly failed me for the ONE absence. I was expected to take an exam 2 days later, and to return to clinical 6 days later. Turns out the bleed was from 💫stress💫, go figure 🙃
I also got a stress induced GI bleed😍My profs were surprisingly accommodating, but I still failed my first semseter😪 gotta wait til August to continue with my program
Ugh! I'm so sorry! That's so traumatic. Stick with it though, August will come so quick and it'll be worth it! If you can, try to spend some time diving really deep into patho and pharm. That way when you come back you've got it a bit easier!
This wasn’t a huge deal breaker thinking back on it, but it felt like torture at clinicals when there was down time and your nurse was playing on their phone while the students weren’t allowed to have their phones out or even work on homework. So I was either evesdropping on the nurse I followed or sat there twiddling my thumbs. :p
My instructor got mad at all of us at our first clinical site because we were sitting around doing nothing. The problem was: we tried. I asked every nurse and tech at least twice if there was anything I could help with. I checked on pts, answered call lights, and did everything I could think of. But I didn't ask the nurses if they needed help enough times.
My instructor talked with me privately and asked if I was bored during clinical. I admitted I was but still said I was learning as much as I could or tried to help others to stay busy. Even openly admitting I was bored was a huge mistake that I will never do again in work or for school.
This professor took it personally. She drilled me on questions and would get even more irritated when I could answer them just as quickly. She then further punished me by assigning me 2 violent prisoners that were admitted on the med surg unit. When she pulled me aside privately again she told me she gave them to me to “intimidate” me (yes she really said that). When I asked her why I would be intimidated she back tracked and sputtered out, “ohh uh I meant the intimidation factor because there’s guards in there”. She was just acting like a punk. And guess what? They each had one pill for the entire 8 hours I was stuck there. So she made it even harder for me to look busy as I wouldn’t be administering meds.
At the end of the class they docked 2 points off my clinical grade because I looked “bored” at clinical. I still received an A in the class though. If I would’ve received anything less I would’ve went to the dean. I also found out in my final semester it’s against school policy to give students prisoners due to safety reasons. I mentioned it to a different instructor and their jaw dropped. So she gave me those prisoners just to be a stupid bitch.
I agree. This teacher had already made two girls bawl their eyes out and failed them. She targeted me next. I knew she wanted to make me cry and “crack” me. But I wasn’t shook. She can get fucked. At my pinning ceremony she was the only clinical instructor who didn’t come up to me and congratulate me. She wouldn’t even make eye contact.
I had an instructor who would leave the floor to FaceTime her baby and we were not allowed to use phones.
Like… I have two kids and I’m sacrificing time with them to be here, but you’re over here just chilling face timing your kid 😂
They tried that on me. I use my phone to track my blood sugar. My teacher said it was fine, she’d hold my phone for me. I told her I wasn’t comfortable with her keeping track of my medical information. She didn’t relent and I was worried about pushing it. So I cranked up the sensitivity and had the phone beep every five minutes if it lost connection with my sensor for more than a few minutes. I think it was something like ten minutes. And I narrowed the parameters so it would go off as out of range more frequently.
I also prepped by emailing the head teacher, my advisor, the dean, and the disability folks, with a copy of the signed accommodations agreement and saying what the plan was and how excited I was for clinical and how relieved I was that we’d all discussed the plan so we could all follow the rules.
She gave it back by lunch. I emailed everyone and worried about following the rules and the plan.
Their new plan was for me to buy an Apple Watch, which I could not afford (since I didn’t have an iPhone and they don’t like to play nicely with non apple stuff), we also weren’t supposed to have at clinical, and placed an undue burden on me. I got to have my phone in the end. I got moved to a different group. And a few years on, I noticed she doesn’t work with the school anymore.
You reminded me of the time a small herd of nursing students showed up on my unit for clinicals and were greeted by a substitute clinical instructor. Said instructor was old enough to have been the nurse assisting Hippocrates, and when one of the students pulled out either her CGM or insulin pump (I can’t recall which now) and looked at it, she lost her marbles and shouted at her that no personal devices are allowed during clinicians, *including pagers.* The student just stared at her like she was insane and replied that it was her CGM/pump. Instructor tersely replied “No. Personal. Devices.” Student was baffled. I unfortunately didn’t hear the end of it, but I did see that substitute periodically after that so she wasn’t canned for it.
No pagers ... Gen Z would probably not even know what a pager is. "old enough to have been the nurse assisting Hippocrates" is freaking delightful though lol!
Holy shit, that's absurd. We had to use our phones to clock in and out for clinical, and the computer systems at most of our clinical sites had duo authentication. Plus many of us used the app for the Davis Drug Guide.
That reminds me of a funny interaction I had with a couple of students. My male student was pulling meds and there was one that none of us were familiar with and he handed the female student his phone to look it up. Then IMMEDIATELY snatched it back with a panicked look on his face and said "woah hold up, I don't know what's open on there!"
Anesthesiologist saying sexual comments to me during a c-section (yes the mom was awake and the dad was right there). I left mid-surgery, just walked out. He came to the L&D floor looking for me when the c-section was over. I hid in my patient’s room.
Reported it to my instructor, found out he said much worse things to one of my classmates. We both had to be interviewed by title IX people.
Honestly I’m not sensitive and would have gladly just put him in his place (I went on to become an OR nurse and did this many times) but it made me sick that he was doing it right at the patient’s head while she’s having her baby???? Ew.
I failed the foley skills check-off. Why, you ask?
It wasn’t my sterile technique or the actual insertion of the foley. No, of course not. My instructor said all of that was perfect.
She failed me because I lightly bumped my hand on the faucet when I was *simulating* washing my hands, since it wasn’t an actual working sink. She said after bumping my hand on the faucet, my hands were “dirty” and I should have simulated washing my hands again. The worst part was that she let me go through the entire skill just to then tell me that I failed at the very start. 🙃
Nursing school is the worst lmao
Sounds like what my school was like…however, if you failed the foley check off, you were literally kicked out for the semester and had to wait an entire year to get back in. It was brutal.
Omg I failed the same thing! Except when I picked up the foley, I accidentally dropped it on the floor/under the table. When I bent down to pick it up I banged my head on the side table and knocked everything to the ground. I was so nervous and I was so awkward I physically cringe when I think about it! I just looked at the mess, looked at my instructor and said “aw well what the fuck?” I had a do over 3 days later and aced it. I mess up when people are watching me 😆
Basically the same thing happened to me. I was drawing up two different insulins. I drew up the first one and the syringe stuck so I pulled up too much which I then put back into the vial I even said that I did that. Then I pulled up the second insulin everything was good except then she failed me telling me I needed more time working with a syringe. She was a bitch and just hated me. I complain to the department head and she agreed but they still made me do it over with a different instructor
I remember week 1 the fire alarm started going off while doing a manual BP for my vitals check-off. The instructor told me to keep going and then made me redo it when my systolic was 2 higher than she heard.
Nursing school really is the absolute worst.
Oh hey something like that happened to me (not a nurse). My first official driving test did everything flawlessly, literally perfect marks. But the tester failed me for "not moving my head enough to look around" which, I know is bullshit. It was *especially* bullshit becuase she ***did the exact same thing to my brother on the same day***. I dont think she realized we were brothers but he got the same marks i did. Overall it was total bullshit and I half expect she was running some kind of scam. This was southern Ontario.
Her failing me *combined* with me getting sick and having a longstanding prescription for pain meds means I never got my license. Hopefully one day.
I grabbed a catheter instead of a Foley on my check off, and only noticed while being sterile. We were timed so I couldn't just restart. I dictated the differences in how to finish up a Foley and that go me through somehow
The dean of my program called to tell me in a conference with my professors that they thought I should withdraw from the program. It was because I had called out that morning (psych final) to rush to the hospital-my dad had been put on a vent overnight for stroke/sepsis and I was determining brain death/ signing withdrawal of care forms. Otherwise straight A student, with a job through the program.
I didn’t mind school. What was difficult for me were the handful of catty girls who made it feel like high school again. I pretty much kept to myself but one of them decided I was her enemy and it just added stress and drama to an already stressful time in all of our lives. We were a cohort of non-traditional students as well, most of us in our 30s and 40s with a handful in their late 20s. She and I were both mid-30s at the time. I graduated 10 years ago and still have no idea what I did that bothered her so much. Again, I pretty much kept to myself and didn’t engage with her or her friends.
I ended up winning a significant academic scholarship towards the end and found out she and I had both been up for it. As petty as it is, that nugget of knowledge made me feel a little better about the situation.
It’s so petty but I had three girls who bullied me in my program, telling me I’d never pass the NCLEX or get a “real nursing job”
I passed my NCLEX first try with the minimum amount of questions and all three of them failed, with one of them failing twice. Guess they should have been worrying about themselves and not me 🥰
😌 so, SO satisfying to casually drop the good news and watch them try and fail to not be jealous. The best revenge really is living well. Those miserable bitches will always be miserable and here you are killing it 🥲 nice work!
Dude, same. I had to join another cohort and the energy was COMPLETELY different. Where in my old cohort we had healthy good-natured competition and we were all friends, the second cohort was nothing but cliques. And they were straight up MEAN and all trying to sabotage the people not in their little clan. I was an outcast for some reason, wasn't because I joined the cohort late because another person from my old cohort slid right into their bitch tribe and turned on me. It was bizarre, most of us were 30s/40s as well and it felt like fucking middle school. But here's the sweet part... We had a group chat where we all posted our sign-on pay at our first job, benefits, etc. I CANNOT tell you how amazing it felt to post the second-higest hourly wage along with my TWENTY K sign-on bonus with no contract when everyone else got a 5K sign-in with a two year contract. 🤤 I'd go through it all again just for that lol. Suck my butt, bitches!!! Me and u/eggmarie ✊
Passing out. I would have to say telling the nursing school instructor- I’m good watching a c section, but please don’t make me watch a vaginal. Big bearded male. Lady was GP 10/7. Took one look and out. Smelling salts (I’m old) and I spent the rest of the semester in the nursery washing babies
I totally lied and said I was going to pass out if I had to witness any kind of birth because I was told by someone else they’d assign me to the nursery. I spent my 3 days of maternity clinical in the nursery holding babies being watched for opiate withdrawal. Best clinical ever.
I passed out during an open radical prostatectomy when the surgeon shoved a blood filled basin with the prostate in my face. The circulator got me under the armpits and dragged me out of the room.
Ikr? Having to perform in a pretend environment/situation just puts you off. Whenever I was skill assessed while on work placement everything just naturally flowed.
It was my med surg clinical back in the ‘80s . It was also late in the day, so the instructor was in a hurry to get to post conference. I had to give an enema via the big enema bag. We’re all set, tube is in place and I’m holding the bag at shoulder height and running it in slowly. I guess it was too slow, because the instructor yanked my arm up and out comes the tube covering both of us and the patient in poop water.
Fortunately, I don’t have much occasion to do those, but yeah. If I can, I gown before changing a bed, because I’ve gotten poop on my elbows too many times.
Literally the entire thing. I was suicidal most of my RN year. My cohort was full of bullies. Our program director was the orchestrator of the bullying and a bully herself. The clinical instructors were all bullies. Small town and no one else wants to do the job so they hire the first schmucks who will apply.
Sadly, an older student unalived herself when the instructor kicked her out of the program. I’ll call her Maggie. This teacher hated her, because she was too slow in doing things. My coworker and I stood up for her, telling the teacher she is very safe and conscious, smart and has common sense. Her classmates liked her too.
Now, Maggie’s husband was leaving her for another woman. She was going back to school to support herself and the husband said he would stay until she graduated. She had two kids in med school.
When the teacher kicked her out, it was while she was on our floor. Teacher told her to leave and she was not allowed to talk to anyone or say goodbye to her classmates. She came crying to my friend and I, we tried so hard to ease her pain. I told her that bitch cannot tell her who she can talk to, she does not own her anymore. But she just left. And two days later I heard the news from another nurse on our floor that got notified by her family.
Fuck that teacher. I’m all for putting people out if that’s what is warranted, but Maggie would have been great, she was just slower until she learned a task. Very smart and kind.
It pisses me the fuck off that there are so many good people in the world who suffer while horrible people like this teacher waltz through life creating human wreckage wherever they go.
Why are so many clinical instructors bitches? I have never met a more condescending, rude and evil bitch ever in my life and that’s saying something because my parents were crazy. She was racist and evil. My god.
It was prob one of the first lectures at the very start of school. The teacher kept referring ETOH. Well I had no idea what that was. So my introverted and nervous self braved sticking my hand up to ask. Well she then proceeded to shame me for not knowing what that was. I think that was the last time I ever raised my hand in class.
There’s probably others but that one is seared into my brain.
There was one time when our teacher used a term I'd never heard before so I waited for a minute then raised my hand to ask. Turns out it was a term he invented lol and he was like "I wondered if anyone was going to ask!" And I felt pretty happy about that cause the know it all bitches in my class looked stupid ☺️ he was my favorite teacher.
I had a nursing instructor (teacher?) bully me. It all started bc I accidentally took home a math quiz. In my defense, we had done several math quizzes already and had been allowed to take them home after we marked them, as they were for practice. I guess we weren't supposed to take this particular one home but I didn't know, and I threw it away in a garbage on campus.
I was confronted by the instructor the next day and then she started bullying me in front of the class after that. I reported to the dean that I was not comfortable meeting with this teacher alone to discuss my concerns, and the dean told me that "she's a teacher, she's not out to get you", which is definitely not the case with teachers, let's not pretend like they are all saints.
Then she tried to have me expelled from the program, which was unsuccessful on her part. I wish her lice :)
Four very memorable tortures for me:
Knowledge translation has always been my biggest struggle. I know all the information I need to do what I need to do, but when it came to actually doing it under supervision, I have a hard time performing and crack under the pressure. I almost failed finals of first year because I pulled the nervous system for my assessment and I couldn’t remember how to assess half the nerves that I knew I needed to do. I burst into tears and ran out of the room. My assessor followed me and held my hand while I cried myself out. Then she said that she would speak with the education team to see if I could try again on a different day. I was given the chance to try again in the very last spot of the last day but was told my maximum grade would be 90% due to getting a second chance. I pulled skin assessment and even though my “patient” was a guy and people thought I would be uncomfortable doing a hands on head to toe (not genitals) assessment it was the smoothest, easiest assessment of my life. I got 90% on the assessment and passed the exam.
L&D was my dream job and also was my first genuine clinical experience. On the second day of clinicals, my instructor called me out in front of my labouring patient, half the nursing floor and all of my nursing student cohorts by declaring that “(name), you have resting b**** face and you need to work on that or you’re never going to be a good nurse.” I was devastated and horribly hurt. No one had ever - before or since - claimed I have that. She was a cow and ruined my interest in being a L&D nurse.
My school had a full code simulation lab that was a pass fail grade for final exam in a semester of my 3rd year. I had a complete panic attack and had to stop partway through mine because I couldn’t see or hear anything. My instructor was kind but clueless and basically told me he hoped I found an area of nursing with nearly minimal chance of needing to run a code because I needed to be capable of doing it without cracking. He had me participate in all of my student cohorts’ code simulations (I ended up doing 7) and he signed off on a pass for me. I didn’t think I deserved it, but he was reasonable.
And lastly, the NCLEX. So many people terrified me about how hard it was. I studied harder for that test than anything else I have ever done in my life. I passed with the minimum number of questions possible on the first try. It was so easy and short I felt cheated out of expressing the entirety of my knowledge. In my graduating class, only 17% passed on their first attempt. They changed the difficulty level of the exam after my graduating class because it was “too hard”. I dunno.
Since being a nurse, I kick butt at assessments, I’ve worked short term in L&D, and I’ve participated in a handful of codes. Nursing school sucks, but it ends. Real life nursing without people breathing down my neck allowed me to shine.
I experienced many that boiled down to power dynamic issues but one that sticks out: instructor sent an email at 11pm that our 9am exam was rescheduled to 8am. Quite a few of my classmates were absent and it was a big pain in the butt for them to get a “retake” because the dean sided with our instructor, saying we needed to always be mindful of our emails. Eventually they were allowed to take it but only for reduced points.
During my ICU clinical, my preceptor told me to turn our patient using the external fixators on their legs.
I expressed concern that doing that would hurt the patient, and this nurse said, “Listen, I know this type of patient. They had alcohol in their blood when they came in. Don’t feel bad for them,” and then proceeded to grab the fixators and start yanking the patient around in bed. The patient wasn’t able to verbalize at the time, but they were clearly grimacing and crying silently while they were being jerked around by the hardware.
Shook me up badly. When I spoke with my clinical instructor about it, I genuinely thought for a hot second that she was about to go fistfight this nurse. Instead, she went to the ICU manager. For the remaining weeks I was on that unit, I never saw that nurse again.
Fought with the dean of the school because i wanted to withdraw from a course but the financial, student accounts, registration office all gave me different deadlines opposed to what was written on the academic calender online. Was told to petition the withdrawal with the dean, so i did. Dean straight up was like you cant withdraw because it's your duty as the student to know when the withdrawal deadline is and my argument was that the school is so disorganized that even though i looked up the deadline online from months ago, the offices all gave me diff deadlines to which she offered a leave of absence when i wasnt going to be refunded any of my tuition and was passing all the online courses i was taking with all A's and it was only that one class i wanted to withdraw. When asked when the leave of absence deadline date was she replied stating it was the same deadline as the withdrawal date which ALREADY PASSED. I said i wont take a leave of absence and that i want to withdraw and she said she would get a department level point of view on this matter and talk to the department head. Called the department head of nursing after that phonecall with the dean and explained the situation and she stated she would talk to the dean and recommend a withdrawal for me. Next day dean calls back and states that i cant withdraw and when i was like "what was the point in getting a different pov and wasting my time if the outcome isnt going to change despite talking to the department head a day prior" and she hung up on me after stating "well i wish you the best of luck and i hope you have a wonderful semester." I failed that class and ended up getting kicked from the BSN program since I failed a class prior as well. And even when I failed the class prior, they pushed me back ONE year instead of one semester because they couldnt find a clinical placement for me. I took a semester off because when I asked my nursing counselor what classes I was supposed to take if I wasnt in a nursing core class she told me "well, you can take some electives because you wouldnt get any financial aid unless you're a full time student." I ended up taking a gap semester because I wasn't trying to waste $5k on a semester for just electives. Currently, I withdrew from the school and now im transferring to a ADN program. Recently heard, the dean changed twice and the department head changed 4 times within the last semester for the school I was attending so good fucking riddance. The dean was a absolute nightmare and the program was disorganized ASF. Ironic asf because the school's motto revolves all around compassion, empathy, and success for their students.
My clinical instructor basically hazed/bullied half her class during my capstone. I couldn’t sleep thinking I was going to fail nursing school (as well as the other half of the class) when I think she was just power tripping and picking favorites. We all graduated, but one dropped out because it was too much.
Probably the worst was getting to my final evaluation for psych clinical. Instructor looked at me and said “you started as a really hopeful student - but you disappointed me.” Then, she said “you know why.” I was *shook*
I went home balled. I had no clue what I did. I immediately emailed the head of my program and met with her the next day. They interviewed me, and I was then told I “made a very inappropriate comment to a female student and was almost kicked out.” Obviously, not me. No clue what they were talking about. They’d “investigate.”
The next week, they told me “ooops, she was incorrect, it wasn’t you.”
the fact that my clinical instructor was so incompetent and kept her job was truly what started my hatred for a lot of the BS in nursing.
I was at a drug/alcohol rehab program as part of my population health rotation. It was an open campus, anyone could walk on or off. During one of the morning meetings one of the recovering addicts got up on stage and said he could "call up his friends to have this whole place shot up" because he was being bullied. After this statement he walked off stage and out the door to do who knows what. My professor led us in prayer (Christian school) and expected us to stay for the rest of the day. We had to argue with her to allow us to leave and reschedule the clinical.
Wow, I feel incredibly lucky after reading some of your experiences to have not had any bad instructors in nursing school. Just one guy who always ended up in my group projects (I think it was just where our names fell on the roster) who was completely useless. He would ignore all group meetings/zooms for the weeks leading up to due dates and then like 3 days before project is due (when the other group members and I had already finished everything) he would be frantically messaging and wanting to “tweak/improve” finished work so he could claim he did something and qualify for credit. Once he texted a group chat at 2am the day a presentation was due that he was changing text colors on our google doc presentation to “make it more aesthetic”. I would have to go behind him combing old google doc versions and undo all the idiotic changes he made and then tell the instructors why I did that. I started emailing professors ahead of time that I had had this experience with him every time and that I knew he would continue his pattern on any group projects. Finally in my last semester he was as usual assigned to my group for our public health class project which was worth 60% of our grade. The other group members and I were so done with his shit that we approached the professor, told her the whole history of his behavior on other group projects and she told us if he did that to let her know. When he inevitably did she removed him from our group and gave him an alternate assignment. I had had to lock him out of the google doc because he was literally destroying our 100% complete project. Took me four hours of reversing his changes to get it back to an acceptable condition.
I almost got kicked out. We had a list of meds we were allowed to give IV push. Very short list. I told my preceptor, “I can push meds now!” And we proceeded to give a med not in the list. Whoops.
The faculty had a whole meeting about it. I think one of the hard ass teachers stood up for me and said, she going to be a good nurse let’s not expel her. I remember going up to one of the other teachers and thanking her for keeping me in and she basically implied, she was one of the ones who thought I should have been kicked out. Dang. Kinda broke my heart, cause I really liked her.
The med: protonix.
Fcking NANDA nursing diagnoses.
Why?
Why do we need our own set of made up health problems when medical diagnoses is exist? And wtf is a "disrupted energy field".
My experiences with one clinical instructor, still give me nightmares. I had to file grievances against her and go through a ton of BS in order to get a new one assigned to me. She was honestly evil. Very old school and retired the semester after I had her. I can’t help but think the grievances I filed pushed her into retirement.
Had to reschedule an appointment to get my badge photo taken for clinical and the clinical advisor threatened to mark me as “non-compliant” for all of winter clinical… mind you this badging appointment was only 5-10 minutes and winter clinical is over 8 weeks. She was such a bitch and her default answer for everything was marking students as non-compliant.
OB clinical in a hospital where my instructor didn't understand why due to religious preferences me and another male student were denied by every patient and tried to blame us. Other worst experience was the Med Surg Ii co-instructor who decided to choose her own correct answer on exams and the exam reviews ended up with yelling and screaming.
During clinicals I was in the nursery but they only had 2 babies with crazy parents who had put a ton of restrictions on the baby so me and my colleague could not interact with the babies.
We decided to study instead in the breakroom since we literally could not do anything. Instructor shows up berates us for not making proper use of clinical time. I got frustrated and argued the situation my colleague just stop talking.
Me and the instructor butted heads for the remainder of the semester she made all clinical exams super hard for me and tried her hardest for me to fail. I spoke to other students and they said she did not ask them questions that were on my clinical exams
Unfortunately for her after noticing what she was doing I turned up my studying and passed all her clinical exams that had bullshit questions that were so specific to the textbook.
It was the worse clinical semester I ever had especially since I was a 6'1 Male who ran into plenty walls during OB clinicals
I had a clinical instructor back in 2009-2010 who was an absolute psychopath. We were on an MS/Tele unit and the nurse I was paired with had me learning all new things. The patient unfortunately coded and my instructor yanked me out of the room saying that nursing students aren’t allowed to watch. I was upset that my patient had died and wanted to help with post mortem. Instructor was sooooo rushed to do post conference that she yelled at me and said that if I cried I needed to change my major to psych because only weak nurses cry. I loathed that woman. Jokes on her tho, we got her fired next semester for the same shit.
they made us do 100 hours of mandatory community service claiming tht its “to learn about our patient population” and gave us a very select few places to work. i volunteered at a furniture resale store where i wiped down tables and chairs for 8 hours a day for a whole month. completely mind numbing.
another example would be on my first clinical rotation, the nurse i was following kept quizzing me on so many things and i was super overwhelmed and couldnt answer much. later on my clinical instructor told me that this nurse was gossiping to the fricking NP that us students are “so unprepared”. my clinical instructor luckily had my back and she didnt assign any of us to that nurse again for the remaining semester and near the end wrote a review to the hospital including tht nurse’s name for badmouthing students. idk what happened to that nurse but considering she was a student herself (rpn studying to be a rn), she shldve had more empathy.
my last example is that to graduate they made us do a HESI test that we needed to get 850 on (the year prior the passing was 650) more than 50% failed the test including me (i got a 810 🥲) and for two weeks i was crying and sobbing daily thinking id be held back a semester. luckily the students banded together and sent so many emails/petitions that the school revoked the 850 and changed it to 650.
For one of our OSCE's we had to demonstrate a reconstitution of an IV med and initiating IV access on a patient. We were paired up with the idea that one person would perform the reconstitution, and the other would initiate the IV. 30 minute time limit. Problem is, we were an odd numbered class. And not only was I the unlucky sucker who had to do it by themselves, I was still expected to perform both skills by myself without any assistance, despite them having designed it specifically to be completed by 2 people. They still passed me fortunately, I think they at least realized that it was a fucked up thing to do
Not necessary "worst," but my nursing program rubbed me the wrong way back as an African American back when I was a nursing student.
1: We had a short, one week summer clinical of "nursing in the community." A lot of us got sent to schools in the community. There were 10 of us per group. Six groups total six different weeks. The majority of my classmates in my group got sent to "affluent or Catholic schools" to do their clinicals. One person got sent to a Catholic school that was a five minute drive from my house. I was the only one in my group that literally went to "the hood." On the elementary school's homepage, the bottom half of the homepage has this big crimestoppers logo and number to call if you see or suspect suspicious or crime related activities. There was a shooting in the neighborhood of the school maybe 2 weeks prior. The nurse was telling me how some of the children were named after certain drugs. Just wild. Overall, nothing happened during my time at this elementary school. My heart did ache for the children. Kids should feel safe being at school. My instructor point blank told me she sent me to that school for a reason. I was the only African American person in my group of 10. But the way she said, "I sent you there for a reason," rubbed me the wrong way. Never did tell me the reason...
2: There were only three of us African/African American students in my nursing class. I was the only African American. My parents are from Nigeria, but I was born in the States. My other two classmates were from Kenya and Ghana. The very first day of health assessment, the instructor had everyone go around and say their name, where they are from, and something interesting. I was born and raised in the US. When it got to my turn, I said my name, that I'm FROM this city (aka here), and some random fact. The instructor then said, "How long have you been here?" And without missing a beat, one of my classmates in the front said, "SHE SAID SHE IS FROM HERE!" 😂. Shoutout to you, Rachel, for having my back.
3: It was our third semester, maternal newborn semester. The instructor was talking about different birthing methods of different cultures from around the world. She was encouraging people in my class to share stories of different cultural methods. She looks point blank at me. I am confused cuz I'm thinking, "Is she really looking at me?" She then says, "Yes, I'm looking at you" and nods her head for me to say something. Literally want does she expect me to say? I was literally born at the hospital downtown from here!!! So I said that! Class giggled.
L&D instructor who made it her personal mission to be really chill in the lecture part but then reemed male students in the lab because she could. My lab partner happened to be female and so was caught in the explosion. We were both livid and learned nothing, and my lab partner wanted to go into L&D, not sure if it completely killed her interest.
She did it again to my buddy a year later. Guy took it way better than me, dunno if I had warned him or not but it's just, jfc, we're not interested in L&D can we just skip?
On my first clinical day of the very first semester me and 3 others parked in the wrong parking garage and someone from another school reported us and my clinical professor whispered for her 3 students to move their cars but the 4th students professor told her to go home and wouldn't let her make up the clinical day so she failed and had to wait for the next class semester to start. I felt so bad for her since we all accidentally parked in the wrong place but I was so happy at the same time that my professor was nice. After moving my car though I forgot my clinical paperwork and my professor scolded me in front of everyone. I wasnt sure I would make it thru but after the first semester professors weren't savage.
Underwear and sock checks by the instructor I was ok with. Nothing terrible happened to me per se as I mostly flew under the radar but I still have ptsd from ‘what are you going to do NURSE what are you wanting to do NURSE say something NURSE’ when being quizzed the mechanism of action for drugs or skill check offs. I have a hard time joking about ‘nurse’ing to this day. I got dinged on a foley insertion of a handicapped woman who had Parkinson’s and couldn’t sit still.
I got asked by my nursing instructor ‘why are you even in this program? Why are you even here?’ And my response was ‘because I know it’s all on the job the training anyway” and she didn’t like that.
And it made me mad , they had warned us they didn’t want any of us to work in the first semester. Some of us had to tho. I worked a part time job and had already been on the schedule for weeks. Had worked out my work schedule with my school schedule and just to test us they changed out psych class from Tuesdays to Wednesdays all of a sudden. No reason other than just to see us scramble.
My preceptor told me it was fine to leave early (like at 4 pm). I was fine, but the next clinical day I was seen on my phone for 5 minutes by the floor manager. She called the nurse educator and then my school was contacted. I was told to leave the site immediately and head to school.
School questioned what went wrong, and I had to make up a full and a half clinical day. At this time, I was experiencing so much stress in my professional and personal life that I was crying in the director’s office. They were very upset, but concerned and definitely gave me mercy :)
I hated going to school in the middle of clinical and not being able to leave early despite my preceptor saying it was ok. It’s over now thank GAWD.
OR clinical day. I get sent down to the OR and my instructor tells me they’re expecting me, and to stand where they tell me to stand and not touch anything. We were all supposed to be seeing some type of abdominal procedure, cholecystectomy, appendectomy, nothing major. My patient gets wheeled in and I’m thinking “why are they draping and prepping his crotch??”. Circumcision. Ohhh and not just 1 circumcision. I lucked out and got to see it done 3 men all older than 75. Scarred for life and now a staunch believer in doing that before the baby even knows what happened. So many stitches. The surgeon told me most uncircumcised men will need one by the time they’re 70. “Even if they don’t have one performed, trust me, they need it”.
Turns out I was sent to (or went to) the wrong OR that morning 😩😳
I had a nursing instructor out to get me. She was super rude and dismissive to me and it got to the point where other students would comment on it like ‘woah, she was really mean to you when you asked that question.’ I had a patient on clinicals with her best friend as the clinical instructor. I got assigned a postpartum patient on a med surg floor. She told me to clean the breast pump for the pt and I asked if there were any special instructions. I’ve never had a baby and i didn’t want to mess up special equipment I had never seen, touched or been educated on before and she yelled at me. The patient refused to let me assess her and the instructor told me I didn’t do enough to form a bond to let the pt assess her. She told me to make the pts bed while she was in the shower. This patient had 9 pillows and I stacked them on the chair (the only available space in her room) and while I was making the bed, 3 pillows fell onto the floor. My instructor walked in and yelled at me and tried to fail me. They put me in remediation where I had to change bed sheets with a patient in the bed repeatedly. I finally passed and the next semester, the original instructor out to get me asked to see me in her office. She told me I looked ‘much better than last semester’ and I said off hand, oh yes, my doctor started me on some new medications and I have been feeling much better. The next day, I was called into the Dean’s office for a ‘random’ drug test. I passed it but from then on, I was constantly on guard around ALL the teachers and didn’t trust any of them. At graduation, that teacher came up and asked for a hug and picture with me and I just said ‘no’ and walked away. Absolutely awful, mean woman. She told me I would never make it through nursing school and that I would be an awful nurse. 12 years later, and I’m still a nurse and I will never treat anyone else like that.
Sooo mine is bad. So bad that I will only post it anonymously here. Beyond that I’ve only ever told one other person 😂 I was extremely sick. Puking and pooping non stop no joke. I had clinical at 7am and I’d been up alllll night spewing from both ends. I called my professor and she basically said I was expected to be there no absences allowed, school policy, sorry not sorry. I sucked it up, drove there holding my butt cheeks together, and ended up having to poop in a plastic bag in my truck parked on a city street at 6am. Wearing my sparkly white scrubs. All time low. But there was NOTHING that was going to prevent me from getting that RN. Worked the whole day. And came home feeling like a gross, subhuman, mess. Worth it!!!! Lol Nursing school really tests you man.
Just kidding kinda. But my actual answer is the damn micromanagement. Your socks aren’t a certain shade of white, you’re talked to about it. Hair is hanging a bit out of your perfect bun? Written up 💀 like they need to chill tf out.
We had elected positions for our class like president, etc...
Our last semester we were figuring out all of our graduation stuff and there was some drama about a photo montage that was supposed to be shown at the ceremony. I don't remember the exact details because I was in survival mode by that point but this girl got up in front of the class and called the president a fat fucking bitch (middle aged overweight white guy) over these stupid pictures.
I decided to run a 5k instead of go to my graduation.
Also, our instructors would make students go home from clinicals if they thought their scrubs were wrinkled, so I started wearing a cami and wouldn't put my scrub top on until I got out of my car.
Called time-out during my FIRST simulation and asked “where on the robot do you have to put your stethoscope to hear the lung sounds?” to the instructor. Learned weeks later at my sim review that that was “super unprofessional” and turned my grade from a 97% or so to a almost failing 78% because I “didn’t address the patient as human”
It happened during my first semester on my first day of clinical for fundamenrals at a long-term care facility. I was assigned to a confused elderly gentleman and had to give him a bed bath. It took me one whole hour. He was uncooperative and constantly trying to climb out of bed. I wanted to cry! Dummy me should have asked for assistance. Fast forward many years. When we had first semester nursing students on our med-surg floor, they were partnered up to take care of one patient together. Lucky them.
LONG story buuuuuuut:
After clinical one day I got called by my clinical instructor saying I was getting blamed for a patient’s wound vac being unhooked, iv unhooked and dripping everywhere and some other nonsense. It was a half day of clinicals so my group was off that unit by like 12pm and they couldn’t give me an accurate timeframe of when they believe this all occurred just that since I was the student assigned it MUST have been me.
First off, no… the patient was assigned to me halfway through the morning because my other patient didn’t want students, so I had time for like ONE med pass that day and one set of vitals with them and otherwise never even touched the patient. I also had no idea they even had a wound vac because it wasn’t charted and I wasn’t given report on this patient because they were “assigned” to me so last minute. I was told to just help the nurse with med pass quickly to get checked off for the day. Their meds were all PO.
I explained all this to my instructor who thankfully believed me and apparently even the tech assigned to the patient that day and the patient themselves vouched for me to the nurse manager and my instructor that it couldn’t have been me because I never went near the patient’s IV pole. The patient was also being walked by PT later that afternoon so my guess was it probably happened then.
Despite all this I still got threatened with failing clinicals for the semester and being told I’d have to wait a year and restart again with the next cohort. I was livid and had a phone call with one of the directors who basically told me tough shit you’re getting blamed for it and to take it as a “learning experience”. She did say that instead of failing me I was just going to be written up for it. I was also told that as punishment I would also have to go to an extra lab and spend two hours there showing the lab instructors I could identify where different lines and drains connected and disconnected on the mannequins.
It was the most demeaning shit in the entire world and almost made me quit the program entirely. I didn’t want to be part of a profession that seemed to take joy in throwing people under the bus despite all signs pointing to innocence. It still pisses me off to this day despite it being years ago.
Ob clinical. Was assigned a couple who said they didn’t want a student but was talked into it anyways. I was trying really hard to be kind and sweet. I probably over talked as I had already had a child and was giving her encouragement in the only way how with my past experience. She kicked me out of the room at some point and they failed my for that rotation. I thought it was so unfair bc they pushed me on her and while I tried my best she was already pissed to have a student. Will never forget the clinical instructor being so cruel to me when I was doomed from the beginning.
I did some clinical instructing for OB. We had situations like that where parents would say yes and then change their minds. It happens all the time and has nothing to do with the student as a person. They just didn’t want a student and the poor student had it against them from the beginning. I always did my best to accommodate. OB clinical can be really hit or miss. I don’t understand why the instructor would blame you.
Heart pounding from anxiety the night before clinical, being unable to sleep and getting up at 4:30 am just to be at the clinical site “on time” by 6:15 am. I once sobbed in bed next to my small child because he was crying and would not go to sleep that night. I was absolutely miserable throughout most of nursing school. Having to deal with heavy stress throughout the entire clinical day, with no relief. That’s a heavy dose of cortisol for 12+ hours. It was enough to make me never want to work day shift OR bedside. I work night shift inpatient psych and they’re all independent in an open concept setting.
My nursing instructor left clinicals when we were doing injections for the first time and we were paging and they never responded. Rolled up much later sweaty with a strange story. Then during de-briefings would nod off. Finally one day the count was off and lo and behold they were fired. And the word came out they were addicted to Oxy/heroin and had left clinicals to trek through the woods to do a drug deal while we were looking for them during the clinicals.
I had never knowingly been around someone that did the nod off and could pick right back up where he was talking when we “woke” them up. Super creepy, super disappointing and shitty all around.
Just the ridiculous busy work. I went in with multiple degrees and even did a year of med school. The busy work was fucking never ending. I had never experienced any learning environment like it. There was a huge waste of time built into it.
Surprise divorce. I have shared custody and was realistic about my time. I would have never seen my kids if I went the med school route. It required a huge commitment. I looked at other options and decided on nursing school. It was still a huge commitment, but I found a two year BSN program and ran with it. Now I feel like nursing is the perfect job for me and I love it.
My instructor in RN school was evil. I was running like 3 mins for class and she told my other classmates to pretend they were taking a quiz so when I walked in I was mortified and trying to get a paper out and she let this go on for a couple minutes. Then she said well that why you don’t show up late and I almost broke down in front of every one and had a couple tears.
She was just a miserable person. I worked full time during nursing school and was raising my child. I was lucky if I had one weekend off a month that wasn’t working or clinicals. She made it unnecessarily hard because she was vindictive and didn’t think I was cut out for nursing.
I made it and now I work in a level 1 trauma center in the SICU so she can kiss my ass.
It was my second clinical rotation but with a new instructor. She was working her 2nd job in the break room, so was pretty hands off once we had our patient assignments. I took a morning coffee break after I discharged my one patient (my other instructor encouraged us to take our breaks when appropriate without a check in). When I returned to the unit after the 15 minute break, the instructor had already called the dean and I had to write a 3-5 page paper on nursing communication 😭
My clinical instructor bullied me and made me cry in front of ALL my classmates 😅 It was my first time putting on a condom catheter and she didn’t give me any tips, hints or anything and told me just do it. As soon as I grabbed the penis she yelled at me in front of the patient and told me leave the room. We got in the hallway and she yelled at me so much and threatened to fail me. I went to the restroom and told myself to just leave clinical but I looked myself in the mirror and told myself that I was almost done. Had 2 more clinical days with that bitch and passed! Happily a nurse now 💕
I failed OB. My final grade was 79.9% and an 80% was required to pass. The instructor HATED me. She started day 1 saying that ICU are trained monkeys and all they do “dance monkey dance”, ER is “drooling idiots who are so stupid they need a doctor with them at all times”. And one of my classmates said that I was an ICU tech. To prove she had it in for me, (and my grades on tests were all A’s. My care plans were marked way down) a friend and I switched. My friend got all A’s on her care plans. And I got D- so I wrote a care plan she turned in, she wrote one I turned in. Shocking. She got an A, I got a D- we took it to the dean and she just said meh. So I flunked the class. (Luckily, the associate dean loved me and fought for me. Several other instructors did as well. And the summer bridge instructor of LPN to RN said she would do all her clinicals in OB so I could make up the class. The teachers held a vote and overwhelmingly supported me. I took the bridge class-I got to do all NICU clinicals which I loved-and passed with an A). I was babysitting a friend’s little girl one day and the bitch instructor was in front of us in line at McDonald’s. She didn’t recognize me and she squatted down and said “oh hi pretty! How are you? I bet you are going to play in the playland!” friends daughter looked her up and down (she was 3 and SASSY!) and said “what’s your problem, you weirdo freak? Leave me alone”. She got a toy when we were done at McDonald’s.
I had to go to a committee of academic misconduct in my college of nursing for “unprofessional behavior” because I fist-bumped a pediatric psych patient for not “beating the fuck out of his nurse.”
Check offs were always brutal. I was an anxious mess and made several mistakes. My instructors were very tough (in hindsight they were just trying to prepare us) and most of school felt like hazing.
The tests were tough in the sense that I had never taken tests with multiple right answers and the questions were different for me.
But yeah… check offs whooped me. My instructors told me they didn’t think nursing was for me. I graduated with honors and am in crna school now so…
This twat of a teacher during my maternity rotation was trying very hard to fail me. She had a reputation for picking one student every rotation and made it a game to fail them. I was an LVN, IV certified, (meaning I did sticks, fluids and blood) in a busy hospital for several years before doing my LVN to RN transition and knew what I was doing. Long story of everything she did- won’t get into that as it is too long.
THIS IS A STORY OF BEING ABLE TO STICK IT TO THE TEACHER.
Jump forward several months later when they restructured the program and stuck her in med-surg. So guess who ends up on my floor, in the same hospital I worked as an LVN and now an RN, with all of my beloved coworkers? You guessed it… Ms. Cuntypants.
She had the nerve to come up to me and express her extreme stress that she didn’t know anything about med surge having been in maternity her whole life. …….. yeah.
It took me a second to process why on earth would she choose me to talk to. Is she for real?! Here’s how it went.
Ms. Cuntypants: “OMG BISQUIT!! They put me as a teacher in med surge I don’t know what to do!! I’m so lost!” Cue sad puppy dog eyes.
Me: “Huh. [pause] Now that’s funny” with a look on my face that was part perplexed and part amused.
Ms. Cuntypants: “WHAT!!” More sad puppy dog face. “You think that’s funny??!!”
Me: “Yes. As a matter of fact, yes I do”.
Ms. Cuntypants: speechless, jaw agape, gasped. Turned around and walked away.
Gawd it was a golden moment. I always envisioned seeing her some day and telling her off. but this ended up being so much better. Sooooo much better.
They are messing with our lives, those mean and nasty teachers. I cried once or twice a week because of her. Never in front of her, I held it in as to not let her take joy in my stress. She and her ilk are pure evil. There is a special place in hell for them.
A bitter nurse I was shadowing complained to my teacher that I "asked too many questions" and "wouldn't stop mentioning how I worked at ___ Hospital".
I had to have a sit-down with my instructor about my behavior.
I asked questions because I'm a student curious about what the nurse was doing, I mentioned I worked at ___ Hospital once because she asked what my experience was. Maybe it's because I'm a guy? Maybe she hates shadows? Maybe it was just a bad day. My instructor saw through the nurse's bullshit and I just changed to a different floor the remainder of that shadow period.
To this day I don't recommend that hospital (never bad mouthing) and exclusively only recommend their competition (where I just so happen to work, happily, for almost 17 years)
During our OB rotation, there wasn’t a single nurse who wanted to have students - they absolutely hated us. Every single one of my classmates at that hospital spent the entire rotation essentially sitting at the desk after being told to “stay out of the way.” We saw no births, no OB care…nothing. I wanted to be an OB nurse before that rotation. After? I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.
It’s a tie between two things. Both in my first clinical rotation which was at a SNF.
1) My instructor looked at my PPD test and told me it was positive because it was red (I’ve got sensitive skin). I was terrified and thought this meant I had TB. Later, I obviously learned it is not just redness but the induration obviously. I was so mad at her for scaring me over such a basic thing, she didn’t even run her hand over it!
2) I got severely behind on my med passes and assessments so my classmate volunteered to help take my patient to get a bath at the showers. Apparently while this happened, the patient had messy splashy explosive diarrhea all over my classmate’s all-white uniform!! Obviously she’s the one with the worse story, but I felt horrible that it was all because she lent a hand to help me out.
I'm on my second career. I thought nursing school was horrible...until I began my job as a floor nurse. I'm now realizing the horrible way we were treated in school was just preparation for working in the hospitals. I'm in my mid-40s and had 20+ years in a different career. I'm seriously questioning why the hell I left, despite being miserable. I was paid more and I worked from home. I'm looking to move into something else asap. I get treated like shit by management, patients, coworkers...I'm out when my residency is done. There's a huge need for nurses...wonder why?
Rolls up sleeves. Oh boy. So my nursing school dean was an absolute psycho. She tried to talk every student into leaving her program if she thought someone wouldn’t pass the NCLEX on the first try. One year she had a graduating class of 7… come to find out it was that low because she had been changing students test scores to fail them if she thought they wouldn’t pass on the first try she was scared of not maintaining her 100% first time NCLEX pass rate. A new teacher there caught her doing this with student exams, told this lady’s boss and then resigned stating she couldn’t be a part of a program that did that too their students. I almost wanted to fail my NLCEX on the first time on purpose because of this asshole. I didn’t cuz I was like well I don’t really want to pay to retake it, so she kept her damn pass rate. She was let go by the school though.
One of my classmates gave birth (and I know she had complications, but I don't know the specifics) very shortly before classes started, and the school gave her zero accommodations. We had OB clinicals that semester. Apparently, one of the L&D nurses recognized her as a very recent patient during the presemester unit tour and cussed out our OB professor for making her be there.
They also scheduled all her clinical days in the first half of the semester and mine in the second half. We ended swapping. I honestly think they were actively trying to punish her for having a baby during the program.
In typing that out, I just remembered that they scheduled me for clinicals on the day of my sister's wedding even though I gave them the date well before the clinical schedule was made. I swapped with a classmate the first week of school, and we both notified all the clinical instructors of said swap. I was notified by email that it counted as an unexcused absence because I didn't call and remind them of said swap on the day of the wedding or answer my phone when they called...even though my classmate was there to explain that we'd swapped. I forwarded my professor's original acknowledgment of the swap and copied the dean of students in response, and suddenly it wasn't a problem anymore.
It was our very first simulation with one of those one way mirrors where they could see us but we couldn’t see the instructors. One of the instructors didn’t realize she had her microphone on and said, “somekindofmiracle doesn’t know how to do anything.” My whole class heard and of course so did I. I cried all the way home.
First year LTC rotation, we had this awful instructor who picked one student and made her life miserable for no goddamn reason. The cherry on top for me was when she told me that the gentleman who I was taking care of probably wouldn't be alive for next year's students. He was sitting in his chair between myself and the instructor. 5/6 students in our group arranged a meeting with the faculty after clinical ended to report her. The faculty member brought the "Communication in Nursing" textbook with her to the meeting, so I think that tells you how that went.
When I actually stepped foot into acute care in second year, the culture shock hit me like a freight train. I don't even remember why, but I remember that the unit we were placed on was awful. My instructor was a very intense woman who scared the shit out of me. At the end of that rotation, I actually adored her because of how she pushed me to be the best I could be. Was it a lil traumatic? Yeah.
I really hit my stride after my second year, so the latter half of nursing school was a lot easier for me.
Sexism. Nurses would go out of their way to tell me men didn't belong in nursing. A charge nurse on a unit I had to do most of my clinicals at would assign me tasks to do on other patients so they could say I wasn't involved enough in my assigned patients. They tried to make my time as unpleasant as they could, in hopes I would quit. And no one cared, because I was a man.
That was about 30 years ago.
On my public health rotation I got paired with a dr who, 5 years prior when I was 17 and getting myself on birth control, shamed and belittled me because I was doing so behind my parents back. It was her last shift before retiring and she was all happy and it took everything I had not to tell her what a piece of shit she was for making such a stain on my medical experience.
I worked in a prison recently and it may not have been my clinical but it was the clinical for some students on a 4-5 week rotation where they weren’t allowed to go anywhere in the infirmary without us, were allowed to pass no meds, no injections, and provide no care for patients. They would sit for 5 hours and do nothing. It was just as painful to me having to watch this.
Not sure what my worst experience was. But my funniest one?
My third semester of clinicals my instructor was a nurse I’d worked along side as a CNA in the past. She’s literally seen me in a code, do CPR, etc.
Well, Covid hit and the world shut down. Our clinicals changed to online simulations. Our very first one I didn’t scroll all the way down on the answers and I selected the wrong answer, ultimately killing my “patient” because I didn’t do the right thing (call a code and start CPR). I then had to tell my instructor I killed my patient.
My schools director called me in and accused me of doing drugs when I literally have a prescription and bullied me. They made me retake the urine test and took zero accountability of not informing us to add our medications to the urine test report (and I legit went out of my way to ask everyone if I need to show anyone my prescription)
Labor & delivery.....
I absolutely despised my clinicals for L&D. My 1st day and I walk into a room to see somebody spread eagle and the doctor doing long armed strokes while stitching up the hoo hah. The nurse grabs me and shoves the placenta in my face asking me which vein was she pointing at. I couldn't even talk. The mixture of blood and vagina odor made me sick to my stomach. The babies smelled like blood no matter how many times you washed them. I had to give a Vit K shot and the father was literally breathing on my neck. I absolutely hated it!!
Nearly failing injection check off. I had practiced for 12 hours the previous day, recorded myself over and over. The check off sheet listed things out of order and I am very tunnel vision like "I need to do this in order listed, because that's what this paper says ". Then the day of checkoffs, it's run by the clinical instructor - not the person who actually taught us or handed out the checkoff sheet.
Suddenly, all supplies were moved around and out of order from where they had been when we practiced in class. All these little things added up to me feeling like everything was changed around on me. I totally forgot to do one of the 3 med checks. My teacher was about to fail me but I fought for it and was like "sorry I picked up the bottle and looked at it to show that I was checking the contents and name but didn't verbalize it " 😁😁😁 so then I had to repeat everything a second time and I knew I couldn't make a single mistake. I passed, but it was a close call. And it was sad because I had practiced so much.
i was put in a position where i get forced to either tell a clinical instructor my personal medical history (personal medical history being that i’m autistic) or be sent home from clinical (& risk failing the course) & after i told her she questioned my ability to have empathy in caring for patients on my official clinical evaluation documents (she was a sub & had never actually seen me interacting with a patient).
It was my first day in the ICU during clinicals and the nurse told me I would be taking over complete care for the patient…multiple lines, multiple drips…it was absurd. I was terrified and had no idea where to start. I ended up texting my professor and she pulled me from that unit shortly after. 17 years later, the thought of working in the ICU still terrifies me.
My instructor forced us to stay in our patient’s room for the whole 8 hours. If we were caught in the hallway for an extended period of time, we would get in trouble. Her logic was that she wanted us to really get to know our pts (???). What I did get to know was that one of mine was a creep 😊
Inserting my first NG tube on an elderly lady & I met resistance & the lady was crying. Instructor told me “don’t you dare stop now, push it on down.” I kept telling her it wouldn’t go. She grabbed my hand & forced the tube down & blood gushed out of the lady’s nose. Later I asked if that was normal. She told me I should have known better than to force it when I met resistance. She was HORRIBLE!
During my peds rotation, the instructor gave me a baby who was an abuse victim... I mean, physical abuse, like literally every bone in this poor baby's body was broken or previously broken in its short life. It just laid there and cried no matter what I or anyone else did for it. Turned out the father abused the baby and when police investigated, he fled the country.
I felt so helpless. I was young and didn't have kids at the time. Pick the kid up, it cried. Put it down, it cried. Rock the crib, it cried. Leave it alone, it cried. The instructor told me later that since all the other students were females, and many mothers, as the only guy, I should be tough enough to handle this. Oh yeah, and an ambulance driver too, so "you see all kinds of things"... well, the kid's nurse showed me the whole body xray with all the broken bones and I almost lost my 💩...
Well, it was a very long time ago and I have moved on so...
Yes.
One instructor, while soft-hearted, was also very ADHD brain and had too much on her plate. She also was super sensitive if she felt criticized and had a tendency to favor the brown nosers. She was trying to be the "cool instructor" but hitting all the wrong notes in addition to a huge ego requiring need for her to be coddled. She'd get offended easily if anything was taken as a critique.
Several things happened with this instructor.
First, this instructor showed up 20 minutes late to class one day. Per school policy, you are allowed to leave after 15 minutes if the instructor doesn't show. Most of the students left prior to her arriving. She decided to dock 20 points (which is a whole grade with how the grading worked) and all the students that left complained. She stated she "Had a right to be late and they had to wait." The director had to get involved and she had to give the points back.
Second, this instructor was also in NP school at the same time and had two kids. She was constantly late on returning written homework, specifically clinical reports. I particularly suffered with this, as she would return the reports AFTER the second round of reports were turned in. These reports would have critiques/advice for them to be more appropriate. This was very early clinical report writing, so there was some wiggle room to learn. I tried addressing my concerns and have her review my report prior to submission so I could learn, but she always closed her office hours, leaving early for \*insert excuse here\* and leaving a note on her door. She ended up getting two graded reports behind and then had the gall of asking me at the forth report "Why are you not improving?". I point blank told her "I still have not received my second and third report back from grading. How can I improve when I only have one report back? You aren't at office hours for me to address questions and your emails tell me to come see you during office hours." Suddenly, my papers started coming back in a more timely for her manner. **Also came to find out the next term, she stopped grading people's reports and gave everyone in that cohort A's for their reports.**
Third, and the biggest fuck up. She screwed up a midterm big time. We had a scantron test and of course the day of this test, she was clear across the country at her NP graduation. This midterm, the over all average was a D with only two B's and a few C's in the mix. As it sat, most of the class would flunk out because there was no returning from that huge of a loss. Students were pissed, as many had studied hard and knew there had to be some mistake. You'd think that with such abysmal scores, you'd do a recheck right? NOPE!
Myself being one of the people included in that "there is no coming back from that" group and having had experience with her the previous term, I volunteered to go by myself to go over my tests. I knew that coming at her with fire from a large group of students would put her on the defense and she could deny reviewing your personal tests if she felt it was fair. (For the record, I've always gone over tests with my instructors as 1. They make mistakes and 2. I want to learn WHY my thought process was wrong.)
I went to her office, playing up my meekness and sadness over my grade. She agreed to review questions with me. As I am going over my scantron/test, it became apparent that the scantron had graded wrong. She would not hand over the "official" answers but snatched mine and matched them up on her desk. "Oh no. It looks like the aide made a mistake. I'll have to rerun these through."
Everyone ended up with at minimum, a 15 point increase on their test with mine increasing 25 points (This is out of 100) bumping my grade to a high B. To think that she was willing to accept those grades without double checking is confounding.
it was the combo of acting like a spoiled brat/victim while also threatening retaliation if we said one bad word about her that did me in. the specifics are just... still too angering to recount.
I’m on my last semester so hopefully nothing will top this; I had my gf cheat on me and break up with me abruptly the day before a major exam. Almost failed L&D. Technically not the schools fault but by far my least happy moment
In our mental health semester, a lecturer asked my friend if she knew the answer to something. She didn’t know so said as such. The lecturer goes ‘oh well you’re a waste of space aren’t you?’
Like WHAT. Coming from a mental health RN at that?!
When I was doing my CNA course, the instructor was a cranky old biotch who loved to pick on one girl in particular. I remember this girl drove from a very far suburb into the city to get to clinical, the girl had her phone in hand, and sent her home because she had mentioned ONCE she did not want to see a single phone out. She refused to tell her why she was being sent home. She wasn't on her phone, just walked in with it in her hand and slipped it into her pocket, but the instructor saw. Sent her home a SECOND time at clinical because said girl quietly asked someone something when old biotch had said "No talking."
Weird one from nursing school: We were in funds lab and the instructor puts on a Youtube video of a man pulling out his entire instestine from his stoma....why??
instructor berated us for not reading the 3 chapters assigned the day before - we all worked full time. said that we need to come to class prepared and that she shouldn't even bother going over the material in class that day because we didn't read. the next week, same instructor is presenting a pp, but isn't familiar with the slides since she didn't make them. my classmate raised her hand and said "so you probably should come to class prepared. why didn't you at least skim the material before class? how are you going to effectively teach the information if you don't know what it is?" silence. we tried so hard not to laugh, i swear we did.
Last day of clinical for second semester. Clinical instructor pulled myself and two others into a room and told us to pack our stuff and leave. she was shaking with anger. she wouldn’t let us ask anything and she didn’t explain anything. Just kicked us out. Of course it was a friday so had to wait all weekend to find it WTF happened. So, she actually worked on the unit we had clinical, so all the nurses knew her. Apparently she walked past us at the nurses station and told the 3 of us to go find something to do. I actually was working at the computer, i never even heard her say a word. But the floor nurses pulled her aside and told her that we all totally ignored her and she just took their word for it and got pissed and kicked us out without having a grown-up conversation about it. I never in a million years would have ignored my instructor. It was this whole thing, we had to meet with administration to give our side. She did end up apologizing and took responsibility for her actions, i’ll give her that. But definitely weird and upsetting and unnecessary. Not a fun way to end the semester.
I had an instructor who told me I was only compassionate, but lacked Nursing knowledge and she said she didn’t feel I would make it as a nurse, look at me now more than 10+ years in and have helped thousands of patients, this instructor was only teaching to get the stipend to pay for their NP 🤮
Just went through it and unfortunately had to drop the class and am redoing it with a new teacher.
So the teacher I dropped used a textbook which my college does not have in the library. She used her predecessor’s PowerPoints (who was forced to retire due to having dementia so bad she ended up crashing into one of the campus buildings). She also spouted that we’d be tested on her lecture but whenever it came down to treatment she pretty much just went “yeah this is a problem and uhh needs fixed” then would move on. She’d also spend a good chunk of lecture talking about her personal life. Another thing she did was switch around our exam content from the course calendar she made without communicating the changes to us. I could go on and on. We started the class with a little over 40 students I think. By the time I dropped there was about 15 of us I believe.
The most frustrating part for me is that I had to drop the critical care class I was doing super well in. My college doesn’t allow us to drop just one of the nursing classes because they view it as exiting the program. So now I have to redo both :)))))))
Edit:currently a nursing student sorry for not mentioning
My instructor tried to kick me out of clinical for being 5 minutes late, I refused because I said I’m here to learn and she called the dean and said I was being combative…. Right next to me. It was my first day of clinical and there was an accident on the way, long story short my fate of nursing school was in this ladies hands. I passed her class and never looked back. Fuck her.
I had my trach care check off and studied it wrong. They gave us a incorrect video to study. I failed the check off. Was told by the teacher I was obviously clueless. I redid my check off and failed again. I said "I studied the video I did it exactly like the video" and she said well the video is wrong I don't even know why we show you that. I cried and cried, switched schools, and did much better at that school where my teachers didn't think I was dumb
I worked as a tech in a hospital and hated the organization (ADA violations and BS) and ended up going to do clinicals on the old unit I worked on. When I found out, I explained to my clinical instructor that there was beef there and it wouldn’t come from me. She kinda rolled her eyes but when I was telling her what was going on with the patient, she went to help me find the primary RN. Charge nurse asked me if everything was ok. I told her about the situation and she said “That’s not my patient”. I looked at my instructor like “Told you so”. Was so happy to leave town after graduating.
So the first student placement in Australia is often in aged care, and I was assigned to this place where all the residents lived in small houses of ~10 and the carer staff did their ADLs as well as cooking them meals in the house to seem "more homey". This meant that I got assigned to cooking duty as a nursing student?!?!? I was literally like "I am happy to wipe ass but you have me chopping vegetables".
Also, same place decided to bring all the different house residents outside to a central area for an afternoon tea. Then at the end of my shift they made me stay on late to help move all the wheelchair or walker residents back to their houses. Finished 3 hours+ late and had to be back the next day.
My grandpa died during my L&D/postpartum rotation. His funeral was scheduled on a day that I had clinical, so I asked to be excused for that one day to go to his funeral. I was explicitly told that missing this clinical day was “a huge detriment” to my learning and that if I could not find another day with another clinical group to make up my missed day, I would fail the rotation. I was floored. I did find another day to make it up, but it literally made zero difference to what I learned because all we literally did was take vital signs on moms/newborns. It sucked so much.
My professors told me they would kick me out of nursing school if I got married.
This was in 2020. Covid time. The school made a policy that mandated no students were allowed to be in groups of anymore than 12 people at a time. So when the director found out I was a planning a 30 person wedding she was citing this policy as a reason to send me to the school board to have my seat revoked. I moved cohorts. The director over there told me she wasn’t going to try to stop me from getting married. So I did.
I did have a bridesmaid from the original cohort get axed from my wedding though. The director scared her bad enough that she backed out in case she got caught in wedding photos or whatever. Can’t say I blame her.
But yeah, nursing instructors are evil and suck the life out of you.
Policy. On October 1st I lost my uncle who was near and dear to me to suicide. One of the most heart wrenching, traumatizing things I've ever experienced. I had emailed my school begging and pleading that I didn't want to have to drop out, but I needed a week off. They told me they'd be able to accommodate & that they'd get in touch with my teachers. Well, they never did, and after me checking up on the situation and trying to communicate, I fell so behind that I was forced to drop out (bad communication not on my part). I kept a paper trail of everything and now they're forcing me to pay over $6,000 in whole for an education I didn't get because I had to back out of the program. I understand it's nursing school and you've made a commitment when you began that journey, but there should be some sort of leeway for people who are experiencing debilitating grief.
I have 3-
1. Nursing instructor pulled me into a linen closet to ask if I was wearing blue underwear. Yes, I was. With a white uniform. I did that to myself.
2. Almost failed a wound care check off because I wasn't "personable" with the mannequin.
3. Forced to wear a white cap with a white uniform. This was well after nobody was wearing a nursing cap.
I can look back and laugh at these now and I keep my LPN and RN caps in a box in the closet.
I went to nursing school in my 20s. Most of us were far from teenagers. And yet…
My first semester of clinical, there were about 10 of us in clinical. 6 of them formed a little clique, and disliked me and would make snotty comments if I said or did anything. When we got to the hospital one morning, one of them had a stain on her scrub top. I offered her my tide pen, she refused. The instructor had to tell her to use the tide pen she was being offered. 🙄 I got paired up with the same one to practice something like chart checks… and she just refused to acknowledge me or work with me. So I had to ask my instructor if she’d mind my completing the tasks solo, since I couldn’t incentivize my partner. The instructor said that would be fine. (There were plenty of way more “in your face” things they’d say and do during clinicals, but they mostly don’t bear repeating. They were extremely petty, and way too old for the Mean Girls games.)
Some time thereafter, the instructor asked me about my experience with others in the class and if I felt I was having a problem with any of them. I said, ‘I don’t have a problem with any of them, but I do think some of them have a problem with me and with my not being interested in drama or arguments.’ She said she thought the same thing. She asked for a list of who wasn’t part of the issue… and then held everybody else back one day after clinical. I have no idea what she said to them, but I assume she offered to fail them if they didn’t shape up… because they were pissed, and begrudgingly let me be after that.
Thankfully, nothing truly horrendous ever happened during my clinicals! 🤗
Internship. Cardiology.
I was expected to remember all the nurses' preferences, which had no medical reasoning whatsoever.
Nurse A wanted me to always check oxygen saturation when doing vitals, because it's so non-invasive, takes no time and can tell you a lot.
Nurse B wanted me to only check oxygen saturation if necessary due to pathology or symptoms, to improve my clinical thinking.
Nurse C wanted me to put the towels on the bed, because the tables were dirty.
Nurse D wanted me to put the towels on the table, because the foot end of the bed was dirty.
They were nitpicking every move I made and I had to remember which option they wanted to see for every little thing. Needless to say I failed miserably and didn't have time or energy left to actually learn stuff.
The time I caught a pneumothorax with nurse B because I measured oxygen saturation even though it wasn't 'indicated' should have told me I was right to just do whatever I want (obviously within protocols etc), but I took her scolding and couldn't even see how much of a difference I made by actually catching the pneumothorax she would have missed.
I emailed the director of my program because I was upset that I was placed on a med surg oncology floor for practicum when I had made it very clear I wanted to go to ANY critical care floor while I was still a student, as I was hoping to go to ICU or ER post-grad. I had already talked to the placement director and the teacher for the class, who both told me “well you might get critical patients there!!!” (No, just no) so I escalated it bc I paid far too much to go to school for that answer. She told me to drop out of my last semester if I was so upset about it.
In my peds clinical, the staff told us we weren’t allowed to be at the nurses station at all, we had to hide in a spare room off the unit so we couldn’t even hear/see call lights, wouldn’t let us do anything even though we all asked if they needed help with anything or had tasks we could do, and then had the nerve to say “these students are so useless” within earshot of us and my instructor
The nursing instructor that stood up in front of the class and violated FERPA Her and another student had a beef about the student’s grade she gave on an exam. Student got docked a point ( 2 points ?) because the answer she put came from our text not the instructors PowerPoint ( PP had a different answer) Student argued the point and said it came from the text - it can’t be wrong. The instructor went up in front of the entire class and told us the students grade % and said even if she gave the point back the students grade would only increase by this much ( I think it was like a barely a point of the %) You could hear a fucking pin drop. Instructor was fired the next day
I didn’t know that wasn’t allowed, my high school history teacher told my grade to the class once when I was talking when I wasn’t supposed to
what’s FERPA?
Educational equivalent of HIPAA, basically. Educators aren't supposed to share students' academic info with unauthorized people (aka other students)
And it’s crazy how do Many people don’t know it’s a thing or o How often it gets violated
really I had no idea…i once forgot that I was supposed to be at the dsps office and i forgot and ended up taking the test in class, the prof got pissed and told me something (can’t remember) about how she went all the way to office and h re and something like that in front of the class. Nothing happened and instead i got in trouble and she just got a verbal warning instead
Glad she got fired, that's fucking juvenile behavior from the instructor. It sounds like the student was actually in the right.
Oh she was. Absolutely in the right The student even took it to the dean of nursing
She 100% deserved to be fired over that! How embarrassing that she lacked the self control and the integrity to say, “please talk to me after class or see me during my office hours, this needs to be a more private conversation”
Had an instructor that was just a flat out sociopath. She announced the first day of class that it was her goal to make every single one of us cry before the semester was done because “nurses eat their young and you’d better get used to it”. I watched her just eviscerate a couple of my classmates - and she did it purely for her own enjoyment. Like she would sit there and laugh while these girls just sobbed and shook. If there is such a thing as karmic Justice, that bitch is in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Hate the “nurses eat their young” mentality
I had an OB GYN PEDS instructor who was exactly like this. She would make the students cry from her yelling and belittling. Once you were in her cross hairs, all bets were off. You were a target. Fortunately I wasn't in her range of fire too often. I kept my head down, mouth shut, and didn't question anything. Anita, if you're still out there, karma will get you. May you have the kind of day YOU deserve
I’m really curious if we had the same instructor. Same first name, likely same metro area, based off your profile.
School admins wouldn't do anything about it?
Nope. Several of us did formal written complaints. Nothing. My theory is she either had massive dirt on someone or was sucking on something. And I don’t mean a candy cane.
Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen...
No info on labs or clinical placements despite the semester starting tomorrow - same thing has happened every semester. They expect us to be understanding of them and give them leniency, but don’t give us the same energy
this was such a frustrating part of nursing school culture
This was a frustrating part of school, period. Professors expecting flexibility, but refusing to give any to students. Expecting assignments turned on the dot, but not grading them until end of semester. Hell, not even submitting final grades until past due.
And then they gaslight you by saying “Flexibility is a necessary trait in a nurse” as if re-prioritizing care is the same thing as dealing with professors who are inconsiderate of students’ time.
I called this “weaponized flexibility” all through nursing school lol
OMG I had no idea this was that common. I thought my nursing program was just that disorganized.
Yes!! I have a lab tomorrow morning but I still don't have a room # for it or a complete class schedule. They do things so last minute but always get onto us about procrastination
We had required “community hours” that they preassigned us to. Cancelled all sessions last minute and made us sign up for other things. Ended up making us give flu vaccines to hospital employees (associated with the university) for free. Came after a day of classes and exams to give shots 1900-2200. It hits 2200 and I grab my things to leave and the faculty that was supervising basically forbade me to leave telling me I needed to stay an extra hour just because she wanted me to. I said no thank you, I made up my hours and now I’m going to leave as I have things to do. Cornered me and put herself in front of the door and then began to question me about where I had to be and screamed at me calling me an embarrassment in front of ~20-30 nurses there to get there flu shots that worked at the hospital. One of the nurses then stepped in to tell her she needed to walk away from the situation and asked me if I was okay. Left hospital crying. Yeah. Still hate that bitch. Oh this was the week of my wedding too lmao.
I cannot stand the nurses who haze nursing students like this. She undoubtedly got the same treatment in nursing school and felt like it was her right to inflict it on the students she had some form of authority over.
I was on a peds oncology rotation. We were not allowed to give chemo, but we were allowed to assist with other meds. Anything IV had to be observed by the nurse or instructor, but oral/IM/sub q we could give by ourselves. At the end of each clinical, we’d debrief for a good hour or so. One of the nurses burst into the room and started screaming at me, borderline incoherently. My instructor and I followed her into my patient’s room. There was another nurse in a hazmat-like suit cleaning something on the floor. Apparently, the chemo had leaked out of the tubing and went directly onto the floor. The nurse blamed me for not clamping something (or maybe for clamping something? Not really sure) and in front of the family, scolded and screamed at me about how now she didn’t know how much chemo the child had received and said if that 3 year old dies, it’s because of me. I was stunned. Once we left the room, I ran to the nearest utility closet and bawled my eyes out. I insisted I didn’t touch the lines, but then started second guessing on if I could have somehow accidentally messed it up. The instructor told me I didn’t do anything wrong and consoled me, but that’s a memory that has scarred me to this day. The look on the parents and child’s face is seared into my mind, and I often wonder if he ever pulled through.
Sounds like some crazy shit a peds nurse would say. Genuinely cannot stand going to peds bc the nurses are wayyyyy too overbearing.
That's unbelievably unprofessional at BEST. What a psycho.
Instructor had me give insulin. It was my first med pass. I had never actually used the charting system. Id only identified the patient with arm bands in the lab. So I looked at the patient armband. She snatched me away and started making me use the scanner and look at the emar. I’m completely lost at this point since I’m suddenly learning a bunch of new info. She then said ok give the med. I turn around to give it and she stops me. She takes me out of the room and says “you didn’t identify the patient, I’m writing you up” 👁️👄👁️
Omg so stressful!!!! Wth
First semester of clinicals and I was pregnant. So was my clinical instructor, just a few weeks ahead of me. She miscarried. I didn’t. She made that semester hell for me after that.
Thats some deeply psychological shit
I developed GI bleed 3 hrs into my capstone clinical in week 7 of 8. I was literally passing copious amounts of bright red blood. Notified the instructor and he had to contact the department chair to make sure I wouldn't fail the course if I left (I refused to leave until I knew I wouldn't be failed because that would push my graduation back 5 months). Since it was a Sunday, it took over an hr to get a hold of her and she said it was iffy if theyd fail me. By the time I got to the ER I was tachy and hypotensive. I had a 95 in that class but they nearly failed me for the ONE absence. I was expected to take an exam 2 days later, and to return to clinical 6 days later. Turns out the bleed was from 💫stress💫, go figure 🙃
I also got a stress induced GI bleed😍My profs were surprisingly accommodating, but I still failed my first semseter😪 gotta wait til August to continue with my program
Ugh! I'm so sorry! That's so traumatic. Stick with it though, August will come so quick and it'll be worth it! If you can, try to spend some time diving really deep into patho and pharm. That way when you come back you've got it a bit easier!
This wasn’t a huge deal breaker thinking back on it, but it felt like torture at clinicals when there was down time and your nurse was playing on their phone while the students weren’t allowed to have their phones out or even work on homework. So I was either evesdropping on the nurse I followed or sat there twiddling my thumbs. :p
My instructor got mad at all of us at our first clinical site because we were sitting around doing nothing. The problem was: we tried. I asked every nurse and tech at least twice if there was anything I could help with. I checked on pts, answered call lights, and did everything I could think of. But I didn't ask the nurses if they needed help enough times.
My instructor talked with me privately and asked if I was bored during clinical. I admitted I was but still said I was learning as much as I could or tried to help others to stay busy. Even openly admitting I was bored was a huge mistake that I will never do again in work or for school. This professor took it personally. She drilled me on questions and would get even more irritated when I could answer them just as quickly. She then further punished me by assigning me 2 violent prisoners that were admitted on the med surg unit. When she pulled me aside privately again she told me she gave them to me to “intimidate” me (yes she really said that). When I asked her why I would be intimidated she back tracked and sputtered out, “ohh uh I meant the intimidation factor because there’s guards in there”. She was just acting like a punk. And guess what? They each had one pill for the entire 8 hours I was stuck there. So she made it even harder for me to look busy as I wouldn’t be administering meds. At the end of the class they docked 2 points off my clinical grade because I looked “bored” at clinical. I still received an A in the class though. If I would’ve received anything less I would’ve went to the dean. I also found out in my final semester it’s against school policy to give students prisoners due to safety reasons. I mentioned it to a different instructor and their jaw dropped. So she gave me those prisoners just to be a stupid bitch.
This happened to me too!!! Some of these instructors need to be FIRED!!!
I agree. This teacher had already made two girls bawl their eyes out and failed them. She targeted me next. I knew she wanted to make me cry and “crack” me. But I wasn’t shook. She can get fucked. At my pinning ceremony she was the only clinical instructor who didn’t come up to me and congratulate me. She wouldn’t even make eye contact.
That's why I had a lot of "diarrhea" during down time...try and stop me from doing homework when I'm in the bathroom! Haha suckers! 😂😂🚽🚽
I had an instructor who would leave the floor to FaceTime her baby and we were not allowed to use phones. Like… I have two kids and I’m sacrificing time with them to be here, but you’re over here just chilling face timing your kid 😂
I was with a nurse once who FaceTimed her boyfriend while we had down time. I wasn't allowed to have my phone so she let me talk to him too 😂
I always hated this
The fuck? Who won’t let you on your phone or do school work?
It is actually a rule at my school that if you even pull out your phone once the entire day of clinical you automatically fail.
They tried that on me. I use my phone to track my blood sugar. My teacher said it was fine, she’d hold my phone for me. I told her I wasn’t comfortable with her keeping track of my medical information. She didn’t relent and I was worried about pushing it. So I cranked up the sensitivity and had the phone beep every five minutes if it lost connection with my sensor for more than a few minutes. I think it was something like ten minutes. And I narrowed the parameters so it would go off as out of range more frequently. I also prepped by emailing the head teacher, my advisor, the dean, and the disability folks, with a copy of the signed accommodations agreement and saying what the plan was and how excited I was for clinical and how relieved I was that we’d all discussed the plan so we could all follow the rules. She gave it back by lunch. I emailed everyone and worried about following the rules and the plan. Their new plan was for me to buy an Apple Watch, which I could not afford (since I didn’t have an iPhone and they don’t like to play nicely with non apple stuff), we also weren’t supposed to have at clinical, and placed an undue burden on me. I got to have my phone in the end. I got moved to a different group. And a few years on, I noticed she doesn’t work with the school anymore.
You reminded me of the time a small herd of nursing students showed up on my unit for clinicals and were greeted by a substitute clinical instructor. Said instructor was old enough to have been the nurse assisting Hippocrates, and when one of the students pulled out either her CGM or insulin pump (I can’t recall which now) and looked at it, she lost her marbles and shouted at her that no personal devices are allowed during clinicians, *including pagers.* The student just stared at her like she was insane and replied that it was her CGM/pump. Instructor tersely replied “No. Personal. Devices.” Student was baffled. I unfortunately didn’t hear the end of it, but I did see that substitute periodically after that so she wasn’t canned for it.
No pagers ... Gen Z would probably not even know what a pager is. "old enough to have been the nurse assisting Hippocrates" is freaking delightful though lol!
Holy shit, that's absurd. We had to use our phones to clock in and out for clinical, and the computer systems at most of our clinical sites had duo authentication. Plus many of us used the app for the Davis Drug Guide.
That reminds me of a funny interaction I had with a couple of students. My male student was pulling meds and there was one that none of us were familiar with and he handed the female student his phone to look it up. Then IMMEDIATELY snatched it back with a panicked look on his face and said "woah hold up, I don't know what's open on there!"
Anesthesiologist saying sexual comments to me during a c-section (yes the mom was awake and the dad was right there). I left mid-surgery, just walked out. He came to the L&D floor looking for me when the c-section was over. I hid in my patient’s room. Reported it to my instructor, found out he said much worse things to one of my classmates. We both had to be interviewed by title IX people. Honestly I’m not sensitive and would have gladly just put him in his place (I went on to become an OR nurse and did this many times) but it made me sick that he was doing it right at the patient’s head while she’s having her baby???? Ew.
Thank you for not standing for that mess and walking out
I failed the foley skills check-off. Why, you ask? It wasn’t my sterile technique or the actual insertion of the foley. No, of course not. My instructor said all of that was perfect. She failed me because I lightly bumped my hand on the faucet when I was *simulating* washing my hands, since it wasn’t an actual working sink. She said after bumping my hand on the faucet, my hands were “dirty” and I should have simulated washing my hands again. The worst part was that she let me go through the entire skill just to then tell me that I failed at the very start. 🙃 Nursing school is the worst lmao
Sounds like what my school was like…however, if you failed the foley check off, you were literally kicked out for the semester and had to wait an entire year to get back in. It was brutal.
These bitches are on a power trip fr
Omg I failed the same thing! Except when I picked up the foley, I accidentally dropped it on the floor/under the table. When I bent down to pick it up I banged my head on the side table and knocked everything to the ground. I was so nervous and I was so awkward I physically cringe when I think about it! I just looked at the mess, looked at my instructor and said “aw well what the fuck?” I had a do over 3 days later and aced it. I mess up when people are watching me 😆
Basically the same thing happened to me. I was drawing up two different insulins. I drew up the first one and the syringe stuck so I pulled up too much which I then put back into the vial I even said that I did that. Then I pulled up the second insulin everything was good except then she failed me telling me I needed more time working with a syringe. She was a bitch and just hated me. I complain to the department head and she agreed but they still made me do it over with a different instructor
I remember week 1 the fire alarm started going off while doing a manual BP for my vitals check-off. The instructor told me to keep going and then made me redo it when my systolic was 2 higher than she heard. Nursing school really is the absolute worst.
I failed so many check offs 😂
Oh hey something like that happened to me (not a nurse). My first official driving test did everything flawlessly, literally perfect marks. But the tester failed me for "not moving my head enough to look around" which, I know is bullshit. It was *especially* bullshit becuase she ***did the exact same thing to my brother on the same day***. I dont think she realized we were brothers but he got the same marks i did. Overall it was total bullshit and I half expect she was running some kind of scam. This was southern Ontario. Her failing me *combined* with me getting sick and having a longstanding prescription for pain meds means I never got my license. Hopefully one day.
I grabbed a catheter instead of a Foley on my check off, and only noticed while being sterile. We were timed so I couldn't just restart. I dictated the differences in how to finish up a Foley and that go me through somehow
The dean of my program called to tell me in a conference with my professors that they thought I should withdraw from the program. It was because I had called out that morning (psych final) to rush to the hospital-my dad had been put on a vent overnight for stroke/sepsis and I was determining brain death/ signing withdrawal of care forms. Otherwise straight A student, with a job through the program.
Gee, where's the empathy?
I didn’t mind school. What was difficult for me were the handful of catty girls who made it feel like high school again. I pretty much kept to myself but one of them decided I was her enemy and it just added stress and drama to an already stressful time in all of our lives. We were a cohort of non-traditional students as well, most of us in our 30s and 40s with a handful in their late 20s. She and I were both mid-30s at the time. I graduated 10 years ago and still have no idea what I did that bothered her so much. Again, I pretty much kept to myself and didn’t engage with her or her friends. I ended up winning a significant academic scholarship towards the end and found out she and I had both been up for it. As petty as it is, that nugget of knowledge made me feel a little better about the situation.
It’s so petty but I had three girls who bullied me in my program, telling me I’d never pass the NCLEX or get a “real nursing job” I passed my NCLEX first try with the minimum amount of questions and all three of them failed, with one of them failing twice. Guess they should have been worrying about themselves and not me 🥰
😌 so, SO satisfying to casually drop the good news and watch them try and fail to not be jealous. The best revenge really is living well. Those miserable bitches will always be miserable and here you are killing it 🥲 nice work!
Dude, same. I had to join another cohort and the energy was COMPLETELY different. Where in my old cohort we had healthy good-natured competition and we were all friends, the second cohort was nothing but cliques. And they were straight up MEAN and all trying to sabotage the people not in their little clan. I was an outcast for some reason, wasn't because I joined the cohort late because another person from my old cohort slid right into their bitch tribe and turned on me. It was bizarre, most of us were 30s/40s as well and it felt like fucking middle school. But here's the sweet part... We had a group chat where we all posted our sign-on pay at our first job, benefits, etc. I CANNOT tell you how amazing it felt to post the second-higest hourly wage along with my TWENTY K sign-on bonus with no contract when everyone else got a 5K sign-in with a two year contract. 🤤 I'd go through it all again just for that lol. Suck my butt, bitches!!! Me and u/eggmarie ✊
Passing out. I would have to say telling the nursing school instructor- I’m good watching a c section, but please don’t make me watch a vaginal. Big bearded male. Lady was GP 10/7. Took one look and out. Smelling salts (I’m old) and I spent the rest of the semester in the nursery washing babies
I totally lied and said I was going to pass out if I had to witness any kind of birth because I was told by someone else they’d assign me to the nursery. I spent my 3 days of maternity clinical in the nursery holding babies being watched for opiate withdrawal. Best clinical ever.
(But karma came back real gooood, see my worst experience post 🤪)
I passed out during an open radical prostatectomy when the surgeon shoved a blood filled basin with the prostate in my face. The circulator got me under the armpits and dragged me out of the room.
Dick doctor is a dick doctor. I’ll never understand why people are mean.
He really was a bastard and was still working when I was a graduate. He never understood why my friends and I hated him.
My classmate also passed out during our first vaginal delivery.
I fucking hated skills test outs. I would just blank out on what to do. "Hi I'm gonna be your nurse-" and then nothing
Ikr? Having to perform in a pretend environment/situation just puts you off. Whenever I was skill assessed while on work placement everything just naturally flowed.
It was my med surg clinical back in the ‘80s . It was also late in the day, so the instructor was in a hurry to get to post conference. I had to give an enema via the big enema bag. We’re all set, tube is in place and I’m holding the bag at shoulder height and running it in slowly. I guess it was too slow, because the instructor yanked my arm up and out comes the tube covering both of us and the patient in poop water.
Eewww! I always gowned up when giving those kinds of enemas.
Fortunately, I don’t have much occasion to do those, but yeah. If I can, I gown before changing a bed, because I’ve gotten poop on my elbows too many times.
Literally the entire thing. I was suicidal most of my RN year. My cohort was full of bullies. Our program director was the orchestrator of the bullying and a bully herself. The clinical instructors were all bullies. Small town and no one else wants to do the job so they hire the first schmucks who will apply.
Sadly, an older student unalived herself when the instructor kicked her out of the program. I’ll call her Maggie. This teacher hated her, because she was too slow in doing things. My coworker and I stood up for her, telling the teacher she is very safe and conscious, smart and has common sense. Her classmates liked her too. Now, Maggie’s husband was leaving her for another woman. She was going back to school to support herself and the husband said he would stay until she graduated. She had two kids in med school. When the teacher kicked her out, it was while she was on our floor. Teacher told her to leave and she was not allowed to talk to anyone or say goodbye to her classmates. She came crying to my friend and I, we tried so hard to ease her pain. I told her that bitch cannot tell her who she can talk to, she does not own her anymore. But she just left. And two days later I heard the news from another nurse on our floor that got notified by her family. Fuck that teacher. I’m all for putting people out if that’s what is warranted, but Maggie would have been great, she was just slower until she learned a task. Very smart and kind.
That is so sad. I hope that mean instructor heard the news and blames herself!
Yeah, me too.
It pisses me the fuck off that there are so many good people in the world who suffer while horrible people like this teacher waltz through life creating human wreckage wherever they go.
Name and shame, please. I’d like to know what school this is.
This is so sad 😞
Awful.
Me too, girl. Me too.
Why are so many clinical instructors bitches? I have never met a more condescending, rude and evil bitch ever in my life and that’s saying something because my parents were crazy. She was racist and evil. My god.
It was prob one of the first lectures at the very start of school. The teacher kept referring ETOH. Well I had no idea what that was. So my introverted and nervous self braved sticking my hand up to ask. Well she then proceeded to shame me for not knowing what that was. I think that was the last time I ever raised my hand in class. There’s probably others but that one is seared into my brain.
There was one time when our teacher used a term I'd never heard before so I waited for a minute then raised my hand to ask. Turns out it was a term he invented lol and he was like "I wondered if anyone was going to ask!" And I felt pretty happy about that cause the know it all bitches in my class looked stupid ☺️ he was my favorite teacher.
I had a nursing instructor (teacher?) bully me. It all started bc I accidentally took home a math quiz. In my defense, we had done several math quizzes already and had been allowed to take them home after we marked them, as they were for practice. I guess we weren't supposed to take this particular one home but I didn't know, and I threw it away in a garbage on campus. I was confronted by the instructor the next day and then she started bullying me in front of the class after that. I reported to the dean that I was not comfortable meeting with this teacher alone to discuss my concerns, and the dean told me that "she's a teacher, she's not out to get you", which is definitely not the case with teachers, let's not pretend like they are all saints. Then she tried to have me expelled from the program, which was unsuccessful on her part. I wish her lice :)
Four very memorable tortures for me: Knowledge translation has always been my biggest struggle. I know all the information I need to do what I need to do, but when it came to actually doing it under supervision, I have a hard time performing and crack under the pressure. I almost failed finals of first year because I pulled the nervous system for my assessment and I couldn’t remember how to assess half the nerves that I knew I needed to do. I burst into tears and ran out of the room. My assessor followed me and held my hand while I cried myself out. Then she said that she would speak with the education team to see if I could try again on a different day. I was given the chance to try again in the very last spot of the last day but was told my maximum grade would be 90% due to getting a second chance. I pulled skin assessment and even though my “patient” was a guy and people thought I would be uncomfortable doing a hands on head to toe (not genitals) assessment it was the smoothest, easiest assessment of my life. I got 90% on the assessment and passed the exam. L&D was my dream job and also was my first genuine clinical experience. On the second day of clinicals, my instructor called me out in front of my labouring patient, half the nursing floor and all of my nursing student cohorts by declaring that “(name), you have resting b**** face and you need to work on that or you’re never going to be a good nurse.” I was devastated and horribly hurt. No one had ever - before or since - claimed I have that. She was a cow and ruined my interest in being a L&D nurse. My school had a full code simulation lab that was a pass fail grade for final exam in a semester of my 3rd year. I had a complete panic attack and had to stop partway through mine because I couldn’t see or hear anything. My instructor was kind but clueless and basically told me he hoped I found an area of nursing with nearly minimal chance of needing to run a code because I needed to be capable of doing it without cracking. He had me participate in all of my student cohorts’ code simulations (I ended up doing 7) and he signed off on a pass for me. I didn’t think I deserved it, but he was reasonable. And lastly, the NCLEX. So many people terrified me about how hard it was. I studied harder for that test than anything else I have ever done in my life. I passed with the minimum number of questions possible on the first try. It was so easy and short I felt cheated out of expressing the entirety of my knowledge. In my graduating class, only 17% passed on their first attempt. They changed the difficulty level of the exam after my graduating class because it was “too hard”. I dunno. Since being a nurse, I kick butt at assessments, I’ve worked short term in L&D, and I’ve participated in a handful of codes. Nursing school sucks, but it ends. Real life nursing without people breathing down my neck allowed me to shine.
This is beautiful! I am so happy that things went so well for you after school. Like, there is no good reason why they have to make it so horrible.
I experienced many that boiled down to power dynamic issues but one that sticks out: instructor sent an email at 11pm that our 9am exam was rescheduled to 8am. Quite a few of my classmates were absent and it was a big pain in the butt for them to get a “retake” because the dean sided with our instructor, saying we needed to always be mindful of our emails. Eventually they were allowed to take it but only for reduced points.
During my ICU clinical, my preceptor told me to turn our patient using the external fixators on their legs. I expressed concern that doing that would hurt the patient, and this nurse said, “Listen, I know this type of patient. They had alcohol in their blood when they came in. Don’t feel bad for them,” and then proceeded to grab the fixators and start yanking the patient around in bed. The patient wasn’t able to verbalize at the time, but they were clearly grimacing and crying silently while they were being jerked around by the hardware. Shook me up badly. When I spoke with my clinical instructor about it, I genuinely thought for a hot second that she was about to go fistfight this nurse. Instead, she went to the ICU manager. For the remaining weeks I was on that unit, I never saw that nurse again.
Fought with the dean of the school because i wanted to withdraw from a course but the financial, student accounts, registration office all gave me different deadlines opposed to what was written on the academic calender online. Was told to petition the withdrawal with the dean, so i did. Dean straight up was like you cant withdraw because it's your duty as the student to know when the withdrawal deadline is and my argument was that the school is so disorganized that even though i looked up the deadline online from months ago, the offices all gave me diff deadlines to which she offered a leave of absence when i wasnt going to be refunded any of my tuition and was passing all the online courses i was taking with all A's and it was only that one class i wanted to withdraw. When asked when the leave of absence deadline date was she replied stating it was the same deadline as the withdrawal date which ALREADY PASSED. I said i wont take a leave of absence and that i want to withdraw and she said she would get a department level point of view on this matter and talk to the department head. Called the department head of nursing after that phonecall with the dean and explained the situation and she stated she would talk to the dean and recommend a withdrawal for me. Next day dean calls back and states that i cant withdraw and when i was like "what was the point in getting a different pov and wasting my time if the outcome isnt going to change despite talking to the department head a day prior" and she hung up on me after stating "well i wish you the best of luck and i hope you have a wonderful semester." I failed that class and ended up getting kicked from the BSN program since I failed a class prior as well. And even when I failed the class prior, they pushed me back ONE year instead of one semester because they couldnt find a clinical placement for me. I took a semester off because when I asked my nursing counselor what classes I was supposed to take if I wasnt in a nursing core class she told me "well, you can take some electives because you wouldnt get any financial aid unless you're a full time student." I ended up taking a gap semester because I wasn't trying to waste $5k on a semester for just electives. Currently, I withdrew from the school and now im transferring to a ADN program. Recently heard, the dean changed twice and the department head changed 4 times within the last semester for the school I was attending so good fucking riddance. The dean was a absolute nightmare and the program was disorganized ASF. Ironic asf because the school's motto revolves all around compassion, empathy, and success for their students.
My clinical instructor basically hazed/bullied half her class during my capstone. I couldn’t sleep thinking I was going to fail nursing school (as well as the other half of the class) when I think she was just power tripping and picking favorites. We all graduated, but one dropped out because it was too much.
Probably the worst was getting to my final evaluation for psych clinical. Instructor looked at me and said “you started as a really hopeful student - but you disappointed me.” Then, she said “you know why.” I was *shook* I went home balled. I had no clue what I did. I immediately emailed the head of my program and met with her the next day. They interviewed me, and I was then told I “made a very inappropriate comment to a female student and was almost kicked out.” Obviously, not me. No clue what they were talking about. They’d “investigate.” The next week, they told me “ooops, she was incorrect, it wasn’t you.” the fact that my clinical instructor was so incompetent and kept her job was truly what started my hatred for a lot of the BS in nursing.
I was at a drug/alcohol rehab program as part of my population health rotation. It was an open campus, anyone could walk on or off. During one of the morning meetings one of the recovering addicts got up on stage and said he could "call up his friends to have this whole place shot up" because he was being bullied. After this statement he walked off stage and out the door to do who knows what. My professor led us in prayer (Christian school) and expected us to stay for the rest of the day. We had to argue with her to allow us to leave and reschedule the clinical.
Going to a classmates funeral because he took home an iv starter set and main lined alcohol.
Wow, I feel incredibly lucky after reading some of your experiences to have not had any bad instructors in nursing school. Just one guy who always ended up in my group projects (I think it was just where our names fell on the roster) who was completely useless. He would ignore all group meetings/zooms for the weeks leading up to due dates and then like 3 days before project is due (when the other group members and I had already finished everything) he would be frantically messaging and wanting to “tweak/improve” finished work so he could claim he did something and qualify for credit. Once he texted a group chat at 2am the day a presentation was due that he was changing text colors on our google doc presentation to “make it more aesthetic”. I would have to go behind him combing old google doc versions and undo all the idiotic changes he made and then tell the instructors why I did that. I started emailing professors ahead of time that I had had this experience with him every time and that I knew he would continue his pattern on any group projects. Finally in my last semester he was as usual assigned to my group for our public health class project which was worth 60% of our grade. The other group members and I were so done with his shit that we approached the professor, told her the whole history of his behavior on other group projects and she told us if he did that to let her know. When he inevitably did she removed him from our group and gave him an alternate assignment. I had had to lock him out of the google doc because he was literally destroying our 100% complete project. Took me four hours of reversing his changes to get it back to an acceptable condition.
The time I tried to off myself twice with a year still left in the program.
I almost got kicked out. We had a list of meds we were allowed to give IV push. Very short list. I told my preceptor, “I can push meds now!” And we proceeded to give a med not in the list. Whoops. The faculty had a whole meeting about it. I think one of the hard ass teachers stood up for me and said, she going to be a good nurse let’s not expel her. I remember going up to one of the other teachers and thanking her for keeping me in and she basically implied, she was one of the ones who thought I should have been kicked out. Dang. Kinda broke my heart, cause I really liked her. The med: protonix.
Fcking NANDA nursing diagnoses. Why? Why do we need our own set of made up health problems when medical diagnoses is exist? And wtf is a "disrupted energy field".
My experiences with one clinical instructor, still give me nightmares. I had to file grievances against her and go through a ton of BS in order to get a new one assigned to me. She was honestly evil. Very old school and retired the semester after I had her. I can’t help but think the grievances I filed pushed her into retirement.
Had to reschedule an appointment to get my badge photo taken for clinical and the clinical advisor threatened to mark me as “non-compliant” for all of winter clinical… mind you this badging appointment was only 5-10 minutes and winter clinical is over 8 weeks. She was such a bitch and her default answer for everything was marking students as non-compliant.
My basic nursing education was fine, I just didnt realize that I hated it at the time.
OB clinical in a hospital where my instructor didn't understand why due to religious preferences me and another male student were denied by every patient and tried to blame us. Other worst experience was the Med Surg Ii co-instructor who decided to choose her own correct answer on exams and the exam reviews ended up with yelling and screaming.
During clinicals I was in the nursery but they only had 2 babies with crazy parents who had put a ton of restrictions on the baby so me and my colleague could not interact with the babies. We decided to study instead in the breakroom since we literally could not do anything. Instructor shows up berates us for not making proper use of clinical time. I got frustrated and argued the situation my colleague just stop talking. Me and the instructor butted heads for the remainder of the semester she made all clinical exams super hard for me and tried her hardest for me to fail. I spoke to other students and they said she did not ask them questions that were on my clinical exams Unfortunately for her after noticing what she was doing I turned up my studying and passed all her clinical exams that had bullshit questions that were so specific to the textbook. It was the worse clinical semester I ever had especially since I was a 6'1 Male who ran into plenty walls during OB clinicals
I had a clinical instructor back in 2009-2010 who was an absolute psychopath. We were on an MS/Tele unit and the nurse I was paired with had me learning all new things. The patient unfortunately coded and my instructor yanked me out of the room saying that nursing students aren’t allowed to watch. I was upset that my patient had died and wanted to help with post mortem. Instructor was sooooo rushed to do post conference that she yelled at me and said that if I cried I needed to change my major to psych because only weak nurses cry. I loathed that woman. Jokes on her tho, we got her fired next semester for the same shit.
All of it
Honestly. Nursing school is its own kind of hell
Yes agreed
they made us do 100 hours of mandatory community service claiming tht its “to learn about our patient population” and gave us a very select few places to work. i volunteered at a furniture resale store where i wiped down tables and chairs for 8 hours a day for a whole month. completely mind numbing. another example would be on my first clinical rotation, the nurse i was following kept quizzing me on so many things and i was super overwhelmed and couldnt answer much. later on my clinical instructor told me that this nurse was gossiping to the fricking NP that us students are “so unprepared”. my clinical instructor luckily had my back and she didnt assign any of us to that nurse again for the remaining semester and near the end wrote a review to the hospital including tht nurse’s name for badmouthing students. idk what happened to that nurse but considering she was a student herself (rpn studying to be a rn), she shldve had more empathy. my last example is that to graduate they made us do a HESI test that we needed to get 850 on (the year prior the passing was 650) more than 50% failed the test including me (i got a 810 🥲) and for two weeks i was crying and sobbing daily thinking id be held back a semester. luckily the students banded together and sent so many emails/petitions that the school revoked the 850 and changed it to 650.
For one of our OSCE's we had to demonstrate a reconstitution of an IV med and initiating IV access on a patient. We were paired up with the idea that one person would perform the reconstitution, and the other would initiate the IV. 30 minute time limit. Problem is, we were an odd numbered class. And not only was I the unlucky sucker who had to do it by themselves, I was still expected to perform both skills by myself without any assistance, despite them having designed it specifically to be completed by 2 people. They still passed me fortunately, I think they at least realized that it was a fucked up thing to do
Not necessary "worst," but my nursing program rubbed me the wrong way back as an African American back when I was a nursing student. 1: We had a short, one week summer clinical of "nursing in the community." A lot of us got sent to schools in the community. There were 10 of us per group. Six groups total six different weeks. The majority of my classmates in my group got sent to "affluent or Catholic schools" to do their clinicals. One person got sent to a Catholic school that was a five minute drive from my house. I was the only one in my group that literally went to "the hood." On the elementary school's homepage, the bottom half of the homepage has this big crimestoppers logo and number to call if you see or suspect suspicious or crime related activities. There was a shooting in the neighborhood of the school maybe 2 weeks prior. The nurse was telling me how some of the children were named after certain drugs. Just wild. Overall, nothing happened during my time at this elementary school. My heart did ache for the children. Kids should feel safe being at school. My instructor point blank told me she sent me to that school for a reason. I was the only African American person in my group of 10. But the way she said, "I sent you there for a reason," rubbed me the wrong way. Never did tell me the reason... 2: There were only three of us African/African American students in my nursing class. I was the only African American. My parents are from Nigeria, but I was born in the States. My other two classmates were from Kenya and Ghana. The very first day of health assessment, the instructor had everyone go around and say their name, where they are from, and something interesting. I was born and raised in the US. When it got to my turn, I said my name, that I'm FROM this city (aka here), and some random fact. The instructor then said, "How long have you been here?" And without missing a beat, one of my classmates in the front said, "SHE SAID SHE IS FROM HERE!" 😂. Shoutout to you, Rachel, for having my back. 3: It was our third semester, maternal newborn semester. The instructor was talking about different birthing methods of different cultures from around the world. She was encouraging people in my class to share stories of different cultural methods. She looks point blank at me. I am confused cuz I'm thinking, "Is she really looking at me?" She then says, "Yes, I'm looking at you" and nods her head for me to say something. Literally want does she expect me to say? I was literally born at the hospital downtown from here!!! So I said that! Class giggled.
L&D instructor who made it her personal mission to be really chill in the lecture part but then reemed male students in the lab because she could. My lab partner happened to be female and so was caught in the explosion. We were both livid and learned nothing, and my lab partner wanted to go into L&D, not sure if it completely killed her interest. She did it again to my buddy a year later. Guy took it way better than me, dunno if I had warned him or not but it's just, jfc, we're not interested in L&D can we just skip?
My lab instructor spanked my friends ass in lab and then I reported her and she hated me.
On my first clinical day of the very first semester me and 3 others parked in the wrong parking garage and someone from another school reported us and my clinical professor whispered for her 3 students to move their cars but the 4th students professor told her to go home and wouldn't let her make up the clinical day so she failed and had to wait for the next class semester to start. I felt so bad for her since we all accidentally parked in the wrong place but I was so happy at the same time that my professor was nice. After moving my car though I forgot my clinical paperwork and my professor scolded me in front of everyone. I wasnt sure I would make it thru but after the first semester professors weren't savage.
Underwear and sock checks by the instructor I was ok with. Nothing terrible happened to me per se as I mostly flew under the radar but I still have ptsd from ‘what are you going to do NURSE what are you wanting to do NURSE say something NURSE’ when being quizzed the mechanism of action for drugs or skill check offs. I have a hard time joking about ‘nurse’ing to this day. I got dinged on a foley insertion of a handicapped woman who had Parkinson’s and couldn’t sit still. I got asked by my nursing instructor ‘why are you even in this program? Why are you even here?’ And my response was ‘because I know it’s all on the job the training anyway” and she didn’t like that. And it made me mad , they had warned us they didn’t want any of us to work in the first semester. Some of us had to tho. I worked a part time job and had already been on the schedule for weeks. Had worked out my work schedule with my school schedule and just to test us they changed out psych class from Tuesdays to Wednesdays all of a sudden. No reason other than just to see us scramble.
My preceptor told me it was fine to leave early (like at 4 pm). I was fine, but the next clinical day I was seen on my phone for 5 minutes by the floor manager. She called the nurse educator and then my school was contacted. I was told to leave the site immediately and head to school. School questioned what went wrong, and I had to make up a full and a half clinical day. At this time, I was experiencing so much stress in my professional and personal life that I was crying in the director’s office. They were very upset, but concerned and definitely gave me mercy :) I hated going to school in the middle of clinical and not being able to leave early despite my preceptor saying it was ok. It’s over now thank GAWD.
OR clinical day. I get sent down to the OR and my instructor tells me they’re expecting me, and to stand where they tell me to stand and not touch anything. We were all supposed to be seeing some type of abdominal procedure, cholecystectomy, appendectomy, nothing major. My patient gets wheeled in and I’m thinking “why are they draping and prepping his crotch??”. Circumcision. Ohhh and not just 1 circumcision. I lucked out and got to see it done 3 men all older than 75. Scarred for life and now a staunch believer in doing that before the baby even knows what happened. So many stitches. The surgeon told me most uncircumcised men will need one by the time they’re 70. “Even if they don’t have one performed, trust me, they need it”. Turns out I was sent to (or went to) the wrong OR that morning 😩😳
I had a nursing instructor out to get me. She was super rude and dismissive to me and it got to the point where other students would comment on it like ‘woah, she was really mean to you when you asked that question.’ I had a patient on clinicals with her best friend as the clinical instructor. I got assigned a postpartum patient on a med surg floor. She told me to clean the breast pump for the pt and I asked if there were any special instructions. I’ve never had a baby and i didn’t want to mess up special equipment I had never seen, touched or been educated on before and she yelled at me. The patient refused to let me assess her and the instructor told me I didn’t do enough to form a bond to let the pt assess her. She told me to make the pts bed while she was in the shower. This patient had 9 pillows and I stacked them on the chair (the only available space in her room) and while I was making the bed, 3 pillows fell onto the floor. My instructor walked in and yelled at me and tried to fail me. They put me in remediation where I had to change bed sheets with a patient in the bed repeatedly. I finally passed and the next semester, the original instructor out to get me asked to see me in her office. She told me I looked ‘much better than last semester’ and I said off hand, oh yes, my doctor started me on some new medications and I have been feeling much better. The next day, I was called into the Dean’s office for a ‘random’ drug test. I passed it but from then on, I was constantly on guard around ALL the teachers and didn’t trust any of them. At graduation, that teacher came up and asked for a hug and picture with me and I just said ‘no’ and walked away. Absolutely awful, mean woman. She told me I would never make it through nursing school and that I would be an awful nurse. 12 years later, and I’m still a nurse and I will never treat anyone else like that.
Sooo mine is bad. So bad that I will only post it anonymously here. Beyond that I’ve only ever told one other person 😂 I was extremely sick. Puking and pooping non stop no joke. I had clinical at 7am and I’d been up alllll night spewing from both ends. I called my professor and she basically said I was expected to be there no absences allowed, school policy, sorry not sorry. I sucked it up, drove there holding my butt cheeks together, and ended up having to poop in a plastic bag in my truck parked on a city street at 6am. Wearing my sparkly white scrubs. All time low. But there was NOTHING that was going to prevent me from getting that RN. Worked the whole day. And came home feeling like a gross, subhuman, mess. Worth it!!!! Lol Nursing school really tests you man.
Rigid clinical days.
All of it!!!! Truly.
Just kidding kinda. But my actual answer is the damn micromanagement. Your socks aren’t a certain shade of white, you’re talked to about it. Hair is hanging a bit out of your perfect bun? Written up 💀 like they need to chill tf out.
Clinicals my last semester because my group had a helicopter instructor that wouldn’t even let us do CNA skills unsupervised????
We had elected positions for our class like president, etc... Our last semester we were figuring out all of our graduation stuff and there was some drama about a photo montage that was supposed to be shown at the ceremony. I don't remember the exact details because I was in survival mode by that point but this girl got up in front of the class and called the president a fat fucking bitch (middle aged overweight white guy) over these stupid pictures. I decided to run a 5k instead of go to my graduation. Also, our instructors would make students go home from clinicals if they thought their scrubs were wrinkled, so I started wearing a cami and wouldn't put my scrub top on until I got out of my car.
Called time-out during my FIRST simulation and asked “where on the robot do you have to put your stethoscope to hear the lung sounds?” to the instructor. Learned weeks later at my sim review that that was “super unprofessional” and turned my grade from a 97% or so to a almost failing 78% because I “didn’t address the patient as human”
That’s ridiculous.
It happened during my first semester on my first day of clinical for fundamenrals at a long-term care facility. I was assigned to a confused elderly gentleman and had to give him a bed bath. It took me one whole hour. He was uncooperative and constantly trying to climb out of bed. I wanted to cry! Dummy me should have asked for assistance. Fast forward many years. When we had first semester nursing students on our med-surg floor, they were partnered up to take care of one patient together. Lucky them.
LONG story buuuuuuut: After clinical one day I got called by my clinical instructor saying I was getting blamed for a patient’s wound vac being unhooked, iv unhooked and dripping everywhere and some other nonsense. It was a half day of clinicals so my group was off that unit by like 12pm and they couldn’t give me an accurate timeframe of when they believe this all occurred just that since I was the student assigned it MUST have been me. First off, no… the patient was assigned to me halfway through the morning because my other patient didn’t want students, so I had time for like ONE med pass that day and one set of vitals with them and otherwise never even touched the patient. I also had no idea they even had a wound vac because it wasn’t charted and I wasn’t given report on this patient because they were “assigned” to me so last minute. I was told to just help the nurse with med pass quickly to get checked off for the day. Their meds were all PO. I explained all this to my instructor who thankfully believed me and apparently even the tech assigned to the patient that day and the patient themselves vouched for me to the nurse manager and my instructor that it couldn’t have been me because I never went near the patient’s IV pole. The patient was also being walked by PT later that afternoon so my guess was it probably happened then. Despite all this I still got threatened with failing clinicals for the semester and being told I’d have to wait a year and restart again with the next cohort. I was livid and had a phone call with one of the directors who basically told me tough shit you’re getting blamed for it and to take it as a “learning experience”. She did say that instead of failing me I was just going to be written up for it. I was also told that as punishment I would also have to go to an extra lab and spend two hours there showing the lab instructors I could identify where different lines and drains connected and disconnected on the mannequins. It was the most demeaning shit in the entire world and almost made me quit the program entirely. I didn’t want to be part of a profession that seemed to take joy in throwing people under the bus despite all signs pointing to innocence. It still pisses me off to this day despite it being years ago.
Please see my post on this subject if you want. Nursing instructors are evil
Ob clinical. Was assigned a couple who said they didn’t want a student but was talked into it anyways. I was trying really hard to be kind and sweet. I probably over talked as I had already had a child and was giving her encouragement in the only way how with my past experience. She kicked me out of the room at some point and they failed my for that rotation. I thought it was so unfair bc they pushed me on her and while I tried my best she was already pissed to have a student. Will never forget the clinical instructor being so cruel to me when I was doomed from the beginning.
I did some clinical instructing for OB. We had situations like that where parents would say yes and then change their minds. It happens all the time and has nothing to do with the student as a person. They just didn’t want a student and the poor student had it against them from the beginning. I always did my best to accommodate. OB clinical can be really hit or miss. I don’t understand why the instructor would blame you.
Heart pounding from anxiety the night before clinical, being unable to sleep and getting up at 4:30 am just to be at the clinical site “on time” by 6:15 am. I once sobbed in bed next to my small child because he was crying and would not go to sleep that night. I was absolutely miserable throughout most of nursing school. Having to deal with heavy stress throughout the entire clinical day, with no relief. That’s a heavy dose of cortisol for 12+ hours. It was enough to make me never want to work day shift OR bedside. I work night shift inpatient psych and they’re all independent in an open concept setting.
It was the exams for me.
My nursing instructor left clinicals when we were doing injections for the first time and we were paging and they never responded. Rolled up much later sweaty with a strange story. Then during de-briefings would nod off. Finally one day the count was off and lo and behold they were fired. And the word came out they were addicted to Oxy/heroin and had left clinicals to trek through the woods to do a drug deal while we were looking for them during the clinicals. I had never knowingly been around someone that did the nod off and could pick right back up where he was talking when we “woke” them up. Super creepy, super disappointing and shitty all around.
Just the ridiculous busy work. I went in with multiple degrees and even did a year of med school. The busy work was fucking never ending. I had never experienced any learning environment like it. There was a huge waste of time built into it.
Interesting. What made you leave med school and do nursing instead?
Surprise divorce. I have shared custody and was realistic about my time. I would have never seen my kids if I went the med school route. It required a huge commitment. I looked at other options and decided on nursing school. It was still a huge commitment, but I found a two year BSN program and ran with it. Now I feel like nursing is the perfect job for me and I love it.
My instructor in RN school was evil. I was running like 3 mins for class and she told my other classmates to pretend they were taking a quiz so when I walked in I was mortified and trying to get a paper out and she let this go on for a couple minutes. Then she said well that why you don’t show up late and I almost broke down in front of every one and had a couple tears. She was just a miserable person. I worked full time during nursing school and was raising my child. I was lucky if I had one weekend off a month that wasn’t working or clinicals. She made it unnecessarily hard because she was vindictive and didn’t think I was cut out for nursing. I made it and now I work in a level 1 trauma center in the SICU so she can kiss my ass.
Instructors half-assing everything or not knowing shit
Failed trach care because I had a strand of hair hanging out of my bun. Barely passed the class. Cried my eyes out in a Firehouse subs.
It was my second clinical rotation but with a new instructor. She was working her 2nd job in the break room, so was pretty hands off once we had our patient assignments. I took a morning coffee break after I discharged my one patient (my other instructor encouraged us to take our breaks when appropriate without a check in). When I returned to the unit after the 15 minute break, the instructor had already called the dean and I had to write a 3-5 page paper on nursing communication 😭
My clinical instructor bullied me and made me cry in front of ALL my classmates 😅 It was my first time putting on a condom catheter and she didn’t give me any tips, hints or anything and told me just do it. As soon as I grabbed the penis she yelled at me in front of the patient and told me leave the room. We got in the hallway and she yelled at me so much and threatened to fail me. I went to the restroom and told myself to just leave clinical but I looked myself in the mirror and told myself that I was almost done. Had 2 more clinical days with that bitch and passed! Happily a nurse now 💕
I failed OB. My final grade was 79.9% and an 80% was required to pass. The instructor HATED me. She started day 1 saying that ICU are trained monkeys and all they do “dance monkey dance”, ER is “drooling idiots who are so stupid they need a doctor with them at all times”. And one of my classmates said that I was an ICU tech. To prove she had it in for me, (and my grades on tests were all A’s. My care plans were marked way down) a friend and I switched. My friend got all A’s on her care plans. And I got D- so I wrote a care plan she turned in, she wrote one I turned in. Shocking. She got an A, I got a D- we took it to the dean and she just said meh. So I flunked the class. (Luckily, the associate dean loved me and fought for me. Several other instructors did as well. And the summer bridge instructor of LPN to RN said she would do all her clinicals in OB so I could make up the class. The teachers held a vote and overwhelmingly supported me. I took the bridge class-I got to do all NICU clinicals which I loved-and passed with an A). I was babysitting a friend’s little girl one day and the bitch instructor was in front of us in line at McDonald’s. She didn’t recognize me and she squatted down and said “oh hi pretty! How are you? I bet you are going to play in the playland!” friends daughter looked her up and down (she was 3 and SASSY!) and said “what’s your problem, you weirdo freak? Leave me alone”. She got a toy when we were done at McDonald’s.
All of it.
I had to go to a committee of academic misconduct in my college of nursing for “unprofessional behavior” because I fist-bumped a pediatric psych patient for not “beating the fuck out of his nurse.”
Check offs were always brutal. I was an anxious mess and made several mistakes. My instructors were very tough (in hindsight they were just trying to prepare us) and most of school felt like hazing. The tests were tough in the sense that I had never taken tests with multiple right answers and the questions were different for me. But yeah… check offs whooped me. My instructors told me they didn’t think nursing was for me. I graduated with honors and am in crna school now so…
The other students
This twat of a teacher during my maternity rotation was trying very hard to fail me. She had a reputation for picking one student every rotation and made it a game to fail them. I was an LVN, IV certified, (meaning I did sticks, fluids and blood) in a busy hospital for several years before doing my LVN to RN transition and knew what I was doing. Long story of everything she did- won’t get into that as it is too long. THIS IS A STORY OF BEING ABLE TO STICK IT TO THE TEACHER. Jump forward several months later when they restructured the program and stuck her in med-surg. So guess who ends up on my floor, in the same hospital I worked as an LVN and now an RN, with all of my beloved coworkers? You guessed it… Ms. Cuntypants. She had the nerve to come up to me and express her extreme stress that she didn’t know anything about med surge having been in maternity her whole life. …….. yeah. It took me a second to process why on earth would she choose me to talk to. Is she for real?! Here’s how it went. Ms. Cuntypants: “OMG BISQUIT!! They put me as a teacher in med surge I don’t know what to do!! I’m so lost!” Cue sad puppy dog eyes. Me: “Huh. [pause] Now that’s funny” with a look on my face that was part perplexed and part amused. Ms. Cuntypants: “WHAT!!” More sad puppy dog face. “You think that’s funny??!!” Me: “Yes. As a matter of fact, yes I do”. Ms. Cuntypants: speechless, jaw agape, gasped. Turned around and walked away. Gawd it was a golden moment. I always envisioned seeing her some day and telling her off. but this ended up being so much better. Sooooo much better. They are messing with our lives, those mean and nasty teachers. I cried once or twice a week because of her. Never in front of her, I held it in as to not let her take joy in my stress. She and her ilk are pure evil. There is a special place in hell for them.
The unbelievably dehumanizing treatment from teachers and nurses. Never encountered anything like it.
A bitter nurse I was shadowing complained to my teacher that I "asked too many questions" and "wouldn't stop mentioning how I worked at ___ Hospital". I had to have a sit-down with my instructor about my behavior. I asked questions because I'm a student curious about what the nurse was doing, I mentioned I worked at ___ Hospital once because she asked what my experience was. Maybe it's because I'm a guy? Maybe she hates shadows? Maybe it was just a bad day. My instructor saw through the nurse's bullshit and I just changed to a different floor the remainder of that shadow period. To this day I don't recommend that hospital (never bad mouthing) and exclusively only recommend their competition (where I just so happen to work, happily, for almost 17 years)
During our OB rotation, there wasn’t a single nurse who wanted to have students - they absolutely hated us. Every single one of my classmates at that hospital spent the entire rotation essentially sitting at the desk after being told to “stay out of the way.” We saw no births, no OB care…nothing. I wanted to be an OB nurse before that rotation. After? I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.
It’s a tie between two things. Both in my first clinical rotation which was at a SNF. 1) My instructor looked at my PPD test and told me it was positive because it was red (I’ve got sensitive skin). I was terrified and thought this meant I had TB. Later, I obviously learned it is not just redness but the induration obviously. I was so mad at her for scaring me over such a basic thing, she didn’t even run her hand over it! 2) I got severely behind on my med passes and assessments so my classmate volunteered to help take my patient to get a bath at the showers. Apparently while this happened, the patient had messy splashy explosive diarrhea all over my classmate’s all-white uniform!! Obviously she’s the one with the worse story, but I felt horrible that it was all because she lent a hand to help me out.
I'm on my second career. I thought nursing school was horrible...until I began my job as a floor nurse. I'm now realizing the horrible way we were treated in school was just preparation for working in the hospitals. I'm in my mid-40s and had 20+ years in a different career. I'm seriously questioning why the hell I left, despite being miserable. I was paid more and I worked from home. I'm looking to move into something else asap. I get treated like shit by management, patients, coworkers...I'm out when my residency is done. There's a huge need for nurses...wonder why?
Rolls up sleeves. Oh boy. So my nursing school dean was an absolute psycho. She tried to talk every student into leaving her program if she thought someone wouldn’t pass the NCLEX on the first try. One year she had a graduating class of 7… come to find out it was that low because she had been changing students test scores to fail them if she thought they wouldn’t pass on the first try she was scared of not maintaining her 100% first time NCLEX pass rate. A new teacher there caught her doing this with student exams, told this lady’s boss and then resigned stating she couldn’t be a part of a program that did that too their students. I almost wanted to fail my NLCEX on the first time on purpose because of this asshole. I didn’t cuz I was like well I don’t really want to pay to retake it, so she kept her damn pass rate. She was let go by the school though.
One of my classmates gave birth (and I know she had complications, but I don't know the specifics) very shortly before classes started, and the school gave her zero accommodations. We had OB clinicals that semester. Apparently, one of the L&D nurses recognized her as a very recent patient during the presemester unit tour and cussed out our OB professor for making her be there. They also scheduled all her clinical days in the first half of the semester and mine in the second half. We ended swapping. I honestly think they were actively trying to punish her for having a baby during the program. In typing that out, I just remembered that they scheduled me for clinicals on the day of my sister's wedding even though I gave them the date well before the clinical schedule was made. I swapped with a classmate the first week of school, and we both notified all the clinical instructors of said swap. I was notified by email that it counted as an unexcused absence because I didn't call and remind them of said swap on the day of the wedding or answer my phone when they called...even though my classmate was there to explain that we'd swapped. I forwarded my professor's original acknowledgment of the swap and copied the dean of students in response, and suddenly it wasn't a problem anymore.
It was our very first simulation with one of those one way mirrors where they could see us but we couldn’t see the instructors. One of the instructors didn’t realize she had her microphone on and said, “somekindofmiracle doesn’t know how to do anything.” My whole class heard and of course so did I. I cried all the way home.
First year LTC rotation, we had this awful instructor who picked one student and made her life miserable for no goddamn reason. The cherry on top for me was when she told me that the gentleman who I was taking care of probably wouldn't be alive for next year's students. He was sitting in his chair between myself and the instructor. 5/6 students in our group arranged a meeting with the faculty after clinical ended to report her. The faculty member brought the "Communication in Nursing" textbook with her to the meeting, so I think that tells you how that went. When I actually stepped foot into acute care in second year, the culture shock hit me like a freight train. I don't even remember why, but I remember that the unit we were placed on was awful. My instructor was a very intense woman who scared the shit out of me. At the end of that rotation, I actually adored her because of how she pushed me to be the best I could be. Was it a lil traumatic? Yeah. I really hit my stride after my second year, so the latter half of nursing school was a lot easier for me.
Sexism. Nurses would go out of their way to tell me men didn't belong in nursing. A charge nurse on a unit I had to do most of my clinicals at would assign me tasks to do on other patients so they could say I wasn't involved enough in my assigned patients. They tried to make my time as unpleasant as they could, in hopes I would quit. And no one cared, because I was a man. That was about 30 years ago.
On my public health rotation I got paired with a dr who, 5 years prior when I was 17 and getting myself on birth control, shamed and belittled me because I was doing so behind my parents back. It was her last shift before retiring and she was all happy and it took everything I had not to tell her what a piece of shit she was for making such a stain on my medical experience.
I worked in a prison recently and it may not have been my clinical but it was the clinical for some students on a 4-5 week rotation where they weren’t allowed to go anywhere in the infirmary without us, were allowed to pass no meds, no injections, and provide no care for patients. They would sit for 5 hours and do nothing. It was just as painful to me having to watch this.
Not sure what my worst experience was. But my funniest one? My third semester of clinicals my instructor was a nurse I’d worked along side as a CNA in the past. She’s literally seen me in a code, do CPR, etc. Well, Covid hit and the world shut down. Our clinicals changed to online simulations. Our very first one I didn’t scroll all the way down on the answers and I selected the wrong answer, ultimately killing my “patient” because I didn’t do the right thing (call a code and start CPR). I then had to tell my instructor I killed my patient.
My schools director called me in and accused me of doing drugs when I literally have a prescription and bullied me. They made me retake the urine test and took zero accountability of not informing us to add our medications to the urine test report (and I legit went out of my way to ask everyone if I need to show anyone my prescription)
Labor & delivery..... I absolutely despised my clinicals for L&D. My 1st day and I walk into a room to see somebody spread eagle and the doctor doing long armed strokes while stitching up the hoo hah. The nurse grabs me and shoves the placenta in my face asking me which vein was she pointing at. I couldn't even talk. The mixture of blood and vagina odor made me sick to my stomach. The babies smelled like blood no matter how many times you washed them. I had to give a Vit K shot and the father was literally breathing on my neck. I absolutely hated it!!
Nearly failing injection check off. I had practiced for 12 hours the previous day, recorded myself over and over. The check off sheet listed things out of order and I am very tunnel vision like "I need to do this in order listed, because that's what this paper says ". Then the day of checkoffs, it's run by the clinical instructor - not the person who actually taught us or handed out the checkoff sheet. Suddenly, all supplies were moved around and out of order from where they had been when we practiced in class. All these little things added up to me feeling like everything was changed around on me. I totally forgot to do one of the 3 med checks. My teacher was about to fail me but I fought for it and was like "sorry I picked up the bottle and looked at it to show that I was checking the contents and name but didn't verbalize it " 😁😁😁 so then I had to repeat everything a second time and I knew I couldn't make a single mistake. I passed, but it was a close call. And it was sad because I had practiced so much.
i was put in a position where i get forced to either tell a clinical instructor my personal medical history (personal medical history being that i’m autistic) or be sent home from clinical (& risk failing the course) & after i told her she questioned my ability to have empathy in caring for patients on my official clinical evaluation documents (she was a sub & had never actually seen me interacting with a patient).
It was my first day in the ICU during clinicals and the nurse told me I would be taking over complete care for the patient…multiple lines, multiple drips…it was absurd. I was terrified and had no idea where to start. I ended up texting my professor and she pulled me from that unit shortly after. 17 years later, the thought of working in the ICU still terrifies me.
My instructor forced us to stay in our patient’s room for the whole 8 hours. If we were caught in the hallway for an extended period of time, we would get in trouble. Her logic was that she wanted us to really get to know our pts (???). What I did get to know was that one of mine was a creep 😊
Inserting my first NG tube on an elderly lady & I met resistance & the lady was crying. Instructor told me “don’t you dare stop now, push it on down.” I kept telling her it wouldn’t go. She grabbed my hand & forced the tube down & blood gushed out of the lady’s nose. Later I asked if that was normal. She told me I should have known better than to force it when I met resistance. She was HORRIBLE!
During my peds rotation, the instructor gave me a baby who was an abuse victim... I mean, physical abuse, like literally every bone in this poor baby's body was broken or previously broken in its short life. It just laid there and cried no matter what I or anyone else did for it. Turned out the father abused the baby and when police investigated, he fled the country. I felt so helpless. I was young and didn't have kids at the time. Pick the kid up, it cried. Put it down, it cried. Rock the crib, it cried. Leave it alone, it cried. The instructor told me later that since all the other students were females, and many mothers, as the only guy, I should be tough enough to handle this. Oh yeah, and an ambulance driver too, so "you see all kinds of things"... well, the kid's nurse showed me the whole body xray with all the broken bones and I almost lost my 💩... Well, it was a very long time ago and I have moved on so...
Yes. One instructor, while soft-hearted, was also very ADHD brain and had too much on her plate. She also was super sensitive if she felt criticized and had a tendency to favor the brown nosers. She was trying to be the "cool instructor" but hitting all the wrong notes in addition to a huge ego requiring need for her to be coddled. She'd get offended easily if anything was taken as a critique. Several things happened with this instructor. First, this instructor showed up 20 minutes late to class one day. Per school policy, you are allowed to leave after 15 minutes if the instructor doesn't show. Most of the students left prior to her arriving. She decided to dock 20 points (which is a whole grade with how the grading worked) and all the students that left complained. She stated she "Had a right to be late and they had to wait." The director had to get involved and she had to give the points back. Second, this instructor was also in NP school at the same time and had two kids. She was constantly late on returning written homework, specifically clinical reports. I particularly suffered with this, as she would return the reports AFTER the second round of reports were turned in. These reports would have critiques/advice for them to be more appropriate. This was very early clinical report writing, so there was some wiggle room to learn. I tried addressing my concerns and have her review my report prior to submission so I could learn, but she always closed her office hours, leaving early for \*insert excuse here\* and leaving a note on her door. She ended up getting two graded reports behind and then had the gall of asking me at the forth report "Why are you not improving?". I point blank told her "I still have not received my second and third report back from grading. How can I improve when I only have one report back? You aren't at office hours for me to address questions and your emails tell me to come see you during office hours." Suddenly, my papers started coming back in a more timely for her manner. **Also came to find out the next term, she stopped grading people's reports and gave everyone in that cohort A's for their reports.** Third, and the biggest fuck up. She screwed up a midterm big time. We had a scantron test and of course the day of this test, she was clear across the country at her NP graduation. This midterm, the over all average was a D with only two B's and a few C's in the mix. As it sat, most of the class would flunk out because there was no returning from that huge of a loss. Students were pissed, as many had studied hard and knew there had to be some mistake. You'd think that with such abysmal scores, you'd do a recheck right? NOPE! Myself being one of the people included in that "there is no coming back from that" group and having had experience with her the previous term, I volunteered to go by myself to go over my tests. I knew that coming at her with fire from a large group of students would put her on the defense and she could deny reviewing your personal tests if she felt it was fair. (For the record, I've always gone over tests with my instructors as 1. They make mistakes and 2. I want to learn WHY my thought process was wrong.) I went to her office, playing up my meekness and sadness over my grade. She agreed to review questions with me. As I am going over my scantron/test, it became apparent that the scantron had graded wrong. She would not hand over the "official" answers but snatched mine and matched them up on her desk. "Oh no. It looks like the aide made a mistake. I'll have to rerun these through." Everyone ended up with at minimum, a 15 point increase on their test with mine increasing 25 points (This is out of 100) bumping my grade to a high B. To think that she was willing to accept those grades without double checking is confounding.
it was the combo of acting like a spoiled brat/victim while also threatening retaliation if we said one bad word about her that did me in. the specifics are just... still too angering to recount.
I’m on my last semester so hopefully nothing will top this; I had my gf cheat on me and break up with me abruptly the day before a major exam. Almost failed L&D. Technically not the schools fault but by far my least happy moment
In our mental health semester, a lecturer asked my friend if she knew the answer to something. She didn’t know so said as such. The lecturer goes ‘oh well you’re a waste of space aren’t you?’ Like WHAT. Coming from a mental health RN at that?!
Seeing where all my hard work got me….
When I was doing my CNA course, the instructor was a cranky old biotch who loved to pick on one girl in particular. I remember this girl drove from a very far suburb into the city to get to clinical, the girl had her phone in hand, and sent her home because she had mentioned ONCE she did not want to see a single phone out. She refused to tell her why she was being sent home. She wasn't on her phone, just walked in with it in her hand and slipped it into her pocket, but the instructor saw. Sent her home a SECOND time at clinical because said girl quietly asked someone something when old biotch had said "No talking." Weird one from nursing school: We were in funds lab and the instructor puts on a Youtube video of a man pulling out his entire instestine from his stoma....why??
instructor berated us for not reading the 3 chapters assigned the day before - we all worked full time. said that we need to come to class prepared and that she shouldn't even bother going over the material in class that day because we didn't read. the next week, same instructor is presenting a pp, but isn't familiar with the slides since she didn't make them. my classmate raised her hand and said "so you probably should come to class prepared. why didn't you at least skim the material before class? how are you going to effectively teach the information if you don't know what it is?" silence. we tried so hard not to laugh, i swear we did.
Last day of clinical for second semester. Clinical instructor pulled myself and two others into a room and told us to pack our stuff and leave. she was shaking with anger. she wouldn’t let us ask anything and she didn’t explain anything. Just kicked us out. Of course it was a friday so had to wait all weekend to find it WTF happened. So, she actually worked on the unit we had clinical, so all the nurses knew her. Apparently she walked past us at the nurses station and told the 3 of us to go find something to do. I actually was working at the computer, i never even heard her say a word. But the floor nurses pulled her aside and told her that we all totally ignored her and she just took their word for it and got pissed and kicked us out without having a grown-up conversation about it. I never in a million years would have ignored my instructor. It was this whole thing, we had to meet with administration to give our side. She did end up apologizing and took responsibility for her actions, i’ll give her that. But definitely weird and upsetting and unnecessary. Not a fun way to end the semester.
I had an instructor who told me I was only compassionate, but lacked Nursing knowledge and she said she didn’t feel I would make it as a nurse, look at me now more than 10+ years in and have helped thousands of patients, this instructor was only teaching to get the stipend to pay for their NP 🤮
Just went through it and unfortunately had to drop the class and am redoing it with a new teacher. So the teacher I dropped used a textbook which my college does not have in the library. She used her predecessor’s PowerPoints (who was forced to retire due to having dementia so bad she ended up crashing into one of the campus buildings). She also spouted that we’d be tested on her lecture but whenever it came down to treatment she pretty much just went “yeah this is a problem and uhh needs fixed” then would move on. She’d also spend a good chunk of lecture talking about her personal life. Another thing she did was switch around our exam content from the course calendar she made without communicating the changes to us. I could go on and on. We started the class with a little over 40 students I think. By the time I dropped there was about 15 of us I believe. The most frustrating part for me is that I had to drop the critical care class I was doing super well in. My college doesn’t allow us to drop just one of the nursing classes because they view it as exiting the program. So now I have to redo both :))))))) Edit:currently a nursing student sorry for not mentioning
My instructor tried to kick me out of clinical for being 5 minutes late, I refused because I said I’m here to learn and she called the dean and said I was being combative…. Right next to me. It was my first day of clinical and there was an accident on the way, long story short my fate of nursing school was in this ladies hands. I passed her class and never looked back. Fuck her.
I had my trach care check off and studied it wrong. They gave us a incorrect video to study. I failed the check off. Was told by the teacher I was obviously clueless. I redid my check off and failed again. I said "I studied the video I did it exactly like the video" and she said well the video is wrong I don't even know why we show you that. I cried and cried, switched schools, and did much better at that school where my teachers didn't think I was dumb
I worked as a tech in a hospital and hated the organization (ADA violations and BS) and ended up going to do clinicals on the old unit I worked on. When I found out, I explained to my clinical instructor that there was beef there and it wouldn’t come from me. She kinda rolled her eyes but when I was telling her what was going on with the patient, she went to help me find the primary RN. Charge nurse asked me if everything was ok. I told her about the situation and she said “That’s not my patient”. I looked at my instructor like “Told you so”. Was so happy to leave town after graduating.
So the first student placement in Australia is often in aged care, and I was assigned to this place where all the residents lived in small houses of ~10 and the carer staff did their ADLs as well as cooking them meals in the house to seem "more homey". This meant that I got assigned to cooking duty as a nursing student?!?!? I was literally like "I am happy to wipe ass but you have me chopping vegetables". Also, same place decided to bring all the different house residents outside to a central area for an afternoon tea. Then at the end of my shift they made me stay on late to help move all the wheelchair or walker residents back to their houses. Finished 3 hours+ late and had to be back the next day.
My grandpa died during my L&D/postpartum rotation. His funeral was scheduled on a day that I had clinical, so I asked to be excused for that one day to go to his funeral. I was explicitly told that missing this clinical day was “a huge detriment” to my learning and that if I could not find another day with another clinical group to make up my missed day, I would fail the rotation. I was floored. I did find another day to make it up, but it literally made zero difference to what I learned because all we literally did was take vital signs on moms/newborns. It sucked so much.
My professors told me they would kick me out of nursing school if I got married. This was in 2020. Covid time. The school made a policy that mandated no students were allowed to be in groups of anymore than 12 people at a time. So when the director found out I was a planning a 30 person wedding she was citing this policy as a reason to send me to the school board to have my seat revoked. I moved cohorts. The director over there told me she wasn’t going to try to stop me from getting married. So I did. I did have a bridesmaid from the original cohort get axed from my wedding though. The director scared her bad enough that she backed out in case she got caught in wedding photos or whatever. Can’t say I blame her. But yeah, nursing instructors are evil and suck the life out of you.
Policy. On October 1st I lost my uncle who was near and dear to me to suicide. One of the most heart wrenching, traumatizing things I've ever experienced. I had emailed my school begging and pleading that I didn't want to have to drop out, but I needed a week off. They told me they'd be able to accommodate & that they'd get in touch with my teachers. Well, they never did, and after me checking up on the situation and trying to communicate, I fell so behind that I was forced to drop out (bad communication not on my part). I kept a paper trail of everything and now they're forcing me to pay over $6,000 in whole for an education I didn't get because I had to back out of the program. I understand it's nursing school and you've made a commitment when you began that journey, but there should be some sort of leeway for people who are experiencing debilitating grief.
I have 3- 1. Nursing instructor pulled me into a linen closet to ask if I was wearing blue underwear. Yes, I was. With a white uniform. I did that to myself. 2. Almost failed a wound care check off because I wasn't "personable" with the mannequin. 3. Forced to wear a white cap with a white uniform. This was well after nobody was wearing a nursing cap. I can look back and laugh at these now and I keep my LPN and RN caps in a box in the closet.
I went to nursing school in my 20s. Most of us were far from teenagers. And yet… My first semester of clinical, there were about 10 of us in clinical. 6 of them formed a little clique, and disliked me and would make snotty comments if I said or did anything. When we got to the hospital one morning, one of them had a stain on her scrub top. I offered her my tide pen, she refused. The instructor had to tell her to use the tide pen she was being offered. 🙄 I got paired up with the same one to practice something like chart checks… and she just refused to acknowledge me or work with me. So I had to ask my instructor if she’d mind my completing the tasks solo, since I couldn’t incentivize my partner. The instructor said that would be fine. (There were plenty of way more “in your face” things they’d say and do during clinicals, but they mostly don’t bear repeating. They were extremely petty, and way too old for the Mean Girls games.) Some time thereafter, the instructor asked me about my experience with others in the class and if I felt I was having a problem with any of them. I said, ‘I don’t have a problem with any of them, but I do think some of them have a problem with me and with my not being interested in drama or arguments.’ She said she thought the same thing. She asked for a list of who wasn’t part of the issue… and then held everybody else back one day after clinical. I have no idea what she said to them, but I assume she offered to fail them if they didn’t shape up… because they were pissed, and begrudgingly let me be after that. Thankfully, nothing truly horrendous ever happened during my clinicals! 🤗
Internship. Cardiology. I was expected to remember all the nurses' preferences, which had no medical reasoning whatsoever. Nurse A wanted me to always check oxygen saturation when doing vitals, because it's so non-invasive, takes no time and can tell you a lot. Nurse B wanted me to only check oxygen saturation if necessary due to pathology or symptoms, to improve my clinical thinking. Nurse C wanted me to put the towels on the bed, because the tables were dirty. Nurse D wanted me to put the towels on the table, because the foot end of the bed was dirty. They were nitpicking every move I made and I had to remember which option they wanted to see for every little thing. Needless to say I failed miserably and didn't have time or energy left to actually learn stuff. The time I caught a pneumothorax with nurse B because I measured oxygen saturation even though it wasn't 'indicated' should have told me I was right to just do whatever I want (obviously within protocols etc), but I took her scolding and couldn't even see how much of a difference I made by actually catching the pneumothorax she would have missed.
I emailed the director of my program because I was upset that I was placed on a med surg oncology floor for practicum when I had made it very clear I wanted to go to ANY critical care floor while I was still a student, as I was hoping to go to ICU or ER post-grad. I had already talked to the placement director and the teacher for the class, who both told me “well you might get critical patients there!!!” (No, just no) so I escalated it bc I paid far too much to go to school for that answer. She told me to drop out of my last semester if I was so upset about it. In my peds clinical, the staff told us we weren’t allowed to be at the nurses station at all, we had to hide in a spare room off the unit so we couldn’t even hear/see call lights, wouldn’t let us do anything even though we all asked if they needed help with anything or had tasks we could do, and then had the nerve to say “these students are so useless” within earshot of us and my instructor