How Did I Get Here?

As far as academics, the past few years have been a blur. Or more appropriately, a series of blows to the head (literally, in one case) that have left me in a state of complete disorientation. Academically speaking, now that I am starting nursing school, I feel like I am starting college all over again.

I graduated from high school in 2007 and immediately enrolled in community college, where I was able to get a spot in exactly zero of the courses I actually needed in order to get into nursing school. The second semester, I was lucky enough to get into two. Four years, an associates degree, a marriage, a spouse's Army deployment, a university transfer, a job, and a promotion later, I was ready to take my TEAS exam and apply to nursing school.

I spent about an hour or two a day for two weeks studying and managed a 92 on the exam, which made me feel pretty good until I saw that the average GPA admitted into the programs I was applying to was sitting comfortably at a 3.75 in many cases. I looked down at my meager 3.67 in shame. Already, I felt like I was a bottom of the barrel candidate. I would flounder around, I was sure, and never get in. Though to be fair, a 3.67 is not the bottom of the barrel, but it was dangerously close to not being the top of the barrel, which, for nursing applicants, is a terrifying place to be stuck.

In the months that followed, my husband got out of the Army and picked out a college he was absolutely set on attending, a good two hours from where we lived, without traffic. This shaved down my number of options for nursing schools to... one. So, not even knowing whether or not I was even accepted, sitting precariously on the waiting list, we packed our things and moved to Sacramento in December.

Lo and behold, the day after we had packed up our U-Haul and drove the bulk of our things to Sacramento, I received an email from Admissions with one word that told me all I needed to know:

Congratulations.

Unbeknownst to me, the underlying message in this was, “Congratulations, you now have an avalanche of paperwork to finish, and if you don't, you're out of luck.”

And so, four online tutorials about patient safety, a few hundred dollars, three immunizations and titers, two TB tests, and one bad computer meltdown later, I was finally save from eviction, so to speak, from nursing school. So began this wild ride that you will accompany me on. Are you buckled in? Are you ready?

I hope I am.