Orientation

My orientation was July 9th and was supposed to be from 9am-2pm, however, it ended early around 12pm. It was pretty straight forward and to the point. I got there about a half hour early and the waiting area was pretty packed with people. I walked in and everybody was dressed in business attire. I started to wear jeans because my dress wardrobe is slim to none, but I borrowed some of my mom's slacks and kept it moving. Glad I changed my mind or I would've felt like an outcast. I scanned the students and only saw one other African American and got extremely nervous because I hate being a minority. By the time they opened the doors to the forum, I noticed it was about 6 or 7 of us, out of about 80 students. The ages varied entirely, definitely a diverse group of students. I saw none of my classmates, so I'm guessing they weren't accepted or hadn't applied yet.

The program head used a powerpoint to go through orientation. The first thing she started with was our anticipated graduation date which I thought was pretty lovely, and thought to myself, that's not that far away. 2014! We went through what our semester would be like... 8 week classes: Mondays and Wednesdays are lecture classes from 8:30am-2pm and Tuesdays and Thursdays are labs/clinicals. She made sure to tell us with clinicals, the program takes what they can get as far as time slots so we can be at a 12 hour clinical once a week or a 6 hour clinical twice a week. She had someone from financial aid come in and talk to us. Also, someone from an organization who gives grants came in. She had three students from the Nursing Student Association come in and invite us to a one day camp to get to know those in our cohort and ask current students questions. I'm shy, but I'll definitely be attending. We went over the book list which I chose to buy from amazon and save a few hundred dollars than to buy from the bookstore. We filled out paperwork and more paperwork. She gave us a uniform order sheet for the bookstore, but I bought my uniform from the uniform website because it saved me $20. Nursing school and preparing for nursing school is so expensive, I'll order from amazon to save $1 if I have to.. every little bit helps :) especially since I'm not working.

Let's see, my orientation was very brief so I'm trying to remember what all she covered. She talked about the grading scale. I think it's a 6 point system now, reminds me of high school. We went over a few points in a handbook. A lot of students had repetitive questions ughhh... just pay attention and listen! We were also advised to get our home duties in order now and learn organization... etc. etc. I've heard of some orientations having current students come in and give their prospective on the program and all sorts of other things. My school was very bland. That's about it regarding orientation.