This article is part of a larger project by The Michigan Daily News section’s Campus Life beat. Reporters spent time observing and interviewing students from various academic programs at the University of Michigan to share what their daily lives and academic experiences are like. Read the other stories here.
From shadowing School of Nursing teams on hospital floors to attending three-hour lectures on identifying bone fractures in children, Nursing students at the University of Michigan participate in a specialized undergraduate program. In this program, students engage in clinical work and learn applied medicine and symptom identification. The Michigan Daily sat down with three Nursing students to learn more about their daily schedules, the challenges of being a Nursing student and how they balance clinical days with schoolwork and extracurriculars.
Karrar Hamoudi, second-year Nursing student
Nursing sophomore Karrar Hamoudi said the focus of the courses and clinical portions in the Nursing program changes every semester. This semester, his classes center on pediatrics and obstetrics.
“Within Nursing School, the way that they have everything set up, is that every semester we’re trying a little bit of everything,” Hamoudi said. “This semester, for example, we’re doing an OB and (pediatrics) unit, which is labor and delivery and a pediatrics unit. So, we have a lecture portion, and then we have a clinical portion for each of those classes.”
As a Nursing student, Hamoudi said he is used to being up early in the morning.
“For most of my clinical days, I am waking up very, very early in the morning, like I wake up at four o’clock in the morning because I have to have breakfast, get dressed and everything, take a shower,” Hamoudi said. “By the time I’m done, I have to be out and I have to be to the clinical floor around 6:30, 6:45 (a.m.)”
Once he arrives at the hospital and meets with the team he is assigned to, Hamoudi receives assignments from his preceptor, a clinician who supervises him and other Nursing students during their rotations. He typically assists one or two patients per day. For Hamoudi, going to the hospital has provided him an opportunity to engage in difficult clinical work and gain hands-on experience with patients.
“Clinicals can be challenging because if you don’t know something you can feel tripped up, and that’s when you want to go back and practice those skills that you’re forgetting or you need to practice more on,” Hamoudi said. “I would say right now we’re in the OB and it’s really interesting because we’re always seeing new things. I just got to see a twin C-section the other day, which was really cool. I got to see some vaginal births. It’s some really interesting things.”
Claire Lee, second-year Nursing Student
Nursing sophomore Claire Lee told The Daily that Nursing students complete their clinical days at either Michigan Medicine or the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs Ann Arbor Healthcare System. Lee currently shadows nurses and assists patients at VA Ann Arbor, where she often utilizes techniques she learned in her courses in alternative pain management.
“What my instructor said is before you think about just giving meds, it’s more important to see what we can do outside of meds because that’s what the nurses do,” Lee said. “The doctors can focus on giving or prescribing these meds, but as a nurse, we’re with the patient almost 24/7 on our shifts. So we would say, based on their needs or problems, we’d have to see what we can do for them outside of medication.”
Lee emphasized the strong community she sees not only among her peers but also at the hospital and the nursing teams she shadows weekly.
“I think we’re all pretty supportive of each other,” Lee said. “I feel like that’s what we have to do as nurses because when I see the actual nurses at the VA hospital, you can see they’re really collaborating with each other and helping each other out, even though one nurse is not assigned to that specific patient. But I feel like here, before going into that, it’s important to build that relationship with your peers.”
Zachary Stankevich, third-year Nursing Student
In an interview with The Daily, Nursing junior Zachary Stankevich said his favorite course in the program has been pathophysiology, which analyzes the development of common diseases and conditions over human lifespans and their relationships with age, lifestyle, cultural background and genetics.
“I would say my favorite class I’ve ever taken so far was in my first semester: pathophysiology, which is known to kind of be one of the harder classes in Nursing school,” Stankevich said. “It is a six-credit course, and I really was scared to take it because I had heard the rumors, but I personally liked the more medical side of nursing — that’s always been my favorite side.”
Cardiology is one of Stankevich’s main points of interest as a Nursing student, which he was able to explore in pathophysiology. Upon graduation, Stankevich wants to work in an intensive care unit.
“I’ve always been a little bit more cardio-focused. That’s always been my thing,” Stankevich said. “I remember when we first started learning about heart failure and we started learning about all these crazy cardiac diseases and disorders that you can develop. I remember my interest was piqued.”
Stankevich is also part of EPIC Pathways: The Nursing Health Equity Scholars Program, housed within the Office of Health Equity and Inclusion at the Nursing School. The organization allows nurses to interact with global health equity leaders and gives them access to career development resources.
“We basically focus on having talks and having speakers come in about diversity and inclusion and opportunities for young nurses and things like that,” Stankevich said. “It makes a very big impact on the students, and they really do stress the importance of providing these opportunities to the students that they have because it does make a real-world difference when you do end up in the actual field.”
Stankevich said for him, the most difficult aspect of the Nursing program is balancing the heavy course load with clinical days and extracurriculars, saying time management is a necessary skill Nursing students learn to develop early on.
“They shove a lot of this huge workload on you,” Stankevich said. “You have these projects. You have assignments. You have two exams on Monday. You have all these things you need to handle, plus clinical, plus you need to go to work now. You also need to spend time with friends and do extracurriculars. It’s about the time that they shove it into. You only get three to four years to fit all of this information.”
Daily Staff Reporter Claudia Minetti can be reached at cminetti@umich.edu.