I Wish I Was a Little Bit…

Taller? No. Faster. I wish I was faster. I don’t feel like I’m making progress. I feel like I run at other people’s walking pace. Why am I so slow? Is it because I’m moving so much weight through space? Is it my legs? Maybe my hair is weighing me down? Yeah, that’s gotta be it…

Sorry to get all venty. I just felt like I needed to put it out there. Then the answer will come to me. Right? Right.

I was rewatching old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy last night to get ready for the season premiere, and while I hated the season premiere, that’s not what I’m going to talk about.

The last couple episodes deal with the residents as they take their boards to become board certified surgeons. Some will go on to be attendings, some join specialty fellowship programs. The point I want to make is the horrible state of panic that they are all in for these boards. Plus the terror that was the actual interview process itself.

Nursing boards are nothing like that. But I’m still very nervous. For us, we sign up for a day in a testing center, and sit at a computer for however many hours it takes you to take the test. I think you can get a total of 5 hours. The test is an adaptive computer program. That means that they want to establish a minimum competency in a certain number of questions (from 75-265).

If you answer an easy question right, it gives you a harder question. Until you answer enough hard questions that you pass. The minimum of questions is 75. If you get to 75 and the computer shuts off, you either did very well, or very very poor. Our professors told us that students from our program usually have the computer shut off around 75. Yeah right.

We do have a very high board pass rate. About 99% on the first time. I figured out that you’ve failed out of the program if you can’t pass boards, because we’ve lost a lot of people. I’m still nervous though, because we have two classes left that could wreck me, then I wouldn’t even make it out of the program to take the boards.

So what do I do? I need to study more. But I also need to do well in my final rotations so that I can get good recommendations for a job. See, I didn’t get placed in the unit I had wanted (and thought I had tested well enough to secure), so now I’ll be at a disadvantage when it comes time to try to get a job there. It’s all very scary to me.

So that’s what I’m doing now. Studying. Worrying. “Jogging.” But mostly worrying. So I also wish I was a little bit more secure in my abilities. It would probably help.

xoxo

Advertisement