Words of Wisdom

  • Health comes first
    Always remember to eat, exercise and SLEEP.  Learn to manage stress effectively to prevent burnout (especially for high stress professional programs such as nursing)
  • Get Involved
    Look into joining clubs that interest you
    Volunteer for a great cause and build your resume
  • Network outside of Nursing
    Get to know students in various studies to get a broader sense of different career paths and perspective
    University is a crucial time for networking
  • Get to know your professors and other various faculty members
    Profs and tutors always welcome students to their office! Book an appointment to talk to them and get to know them at a personal level! They will give you great advice based on their experiences
  • Professionalism
    Social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) are public domain.  Be careful with what you say and what you post.  Make sure you do not cross any professional boundaries. (e.g. mocking professors or discussing private patient information on fb)
  • Textbooks
    Don’t buy every textbook, only the required ones. You will learn within the first couple weeks which are necessary. For those that aren’t, you can find them on reserve in the library.
  • Study little bits everyday
  • Have fun!
    Make time for yourself to relax, try new things and make great experiences

Tips from one generation to the next…

Hello there future colleagues!!

Congratulations and welcome to a new beginning. My name is Jonathon Valeri, a graduate of the Mohawk-McMaster-Conestoga Collaborative Nursing Program, Kaleidoscope 1st Generation (2013). Take your time and find me on our wall of honour, where you will find yourself in the not to far future. I know you’re busy, so I’ll keep these tips short and sweet. I know you want to get ahead, get the grades, and manage that time you will have little of. So here some tips being a past technological savvy nursing student that aided my work throughout McMaster.

Trying to write notes? Don’t know how to organize them? Try an amazing program that can help you learn how to excel as a student with a service like no other. Try Evernote, [ http://www.evernote.com ]. You get a free account in which you can sync your notes and not only have them on your computer, but also on your mobile smart phone, use on another computer and even share books and notes. Plus, it comes with extras that you can add for fun in dealing with your notes (photo sync to notes from phone)

Looking for storage? Check out Dropbox! The online storage that goes where you go! Be sure to use your McMaster email when signing up, because…drum roll, you get massive amounts of extra storage due to its promotion for students [ http://www.dropbox.com ]. You can even share folders to keep you and your study buddies up-to-date with each others notes or projects.

Don’t like Dropbox? Check out GoogleDrive (requires GMail account) or SugarSync http://www.sugarsync.com for amazing cross platform and syncing capabilities. Or, you can use all three to store your items for FREE! Not to mention, if you lose a USB stick or computer crashes, these items will always be there as a back up. Trust me, nothing more important than a back-up plan when in nursing.

Reflective Learning??? What’s that?? We’ll, welcome to nursing and welcome to the future. In nursing, your going to be asked to do some…reflective learning. Ask your teachers, or better yet, ask the College of Nurses of Ontario what it is because in order to be a nurse, you need to be reflective of your practice! Don’t believe me? Check out our regulatory bodies at http://www.cno.org. Now you know! Well, back to what I wanted to pass some advice to you guys. Be sure to check out some journaling software online to help. If you have an Apple, check out DayOne http://www.dayoneapp.com for cross platform journaling, photo taking, and more. You can link it to an app for the iPhone, which allows you to do one thing on your phone and amazing have it on your Apple Computer (have to purchase both). When you need to look back on learning for possibly (cough, cough) a paper or other work, you have hard evidence with date, time weather, (maybe photo), and exact location, to impress your instructors with how amazing you are at reflecting!!

One last thing!!!! Don’t put yourself in a bubble with just school and work. You’ll get burnout. Be sure to get involved and be involved at school with anything else other than your direct mark! Be engaged and active in your learning!!

“Student engagement is the product of motivation and active learning. It is a product rather than a sum because it will not occur if either element is missing,” writes Elizabeth F. Barkley in [**_Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty_**].

Tips Courtesy of John Valeri

For more tips check out the ebook “Tips for Succeeding in Nursing School” created by the Nursing Students of Ontario (NSO)

You can find it here: http://nso.rnao.ca/sites/nso/files/EFinal2.pdf