How to Study for Licensing Exams: A guest post by Charting New Territory

I am really excited to have Sarah from Charting New Territory guest-posting today! She has been a huge supporter of my studying and has encouraged me along the way. Today, she is giving her story on what studying for the NCLEX was like for her. Please give her a warm welcome!

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So, you want to be a Nurse?

Hello, my name is Sarah and I am a Registered Nurse and I blog over at Charting New Territory. I love introducing myself, and if you have a title that you worked hard for, and had to pass a national or state exam for, you know just how near and dear my title is to my heart. As nurses, we are put through the ringer during school. We work for that title, and everything we do in our nursing programs leads up to that one glorious day; the day we take NCLEX!

I had always been horrified of the dreaded (dun dun dun) NCLEX. Since my freshman semester in nursing school, I knew, that one day- this one exam would be the end all, be all of my success. Then, finding out that only seventy five percent of people in the United States pass on the first try scared me even more. Failure was NOT an option for me. You can imagine my stress level.

When I was preparing, I took a course called the Kaplan Test Prep for NCLEX-RN. My whole strategy prior to taking this class was to learn everything, memorize every disease, treatment, and care planning process. Boy, was I wrong and in need of some better test taking skills. Thank goodness for the Kaplan course. I learned how to answer questions by process of elimination. Hello easy! Instead of trying to learn everything, I learned how to strategically approach an exam where you are expected to know everything. Who can know everything? No one. Not me anyway.

So, I took one month to prepare. I graduated on January 11, and I took my exam February 11. I found out I passed on Valentine’s day; February 14th. In order to prepare I watched content videos, I committed to one every day. I also did a maximum of one hundred practice questions each day, and on three days out of that month I did a mock NCLEX with two hundred and sixty questions- which is the max you can expect to get on the exam. Those were rough!

When the day before arrived, I was horribly stressed, and anxious. I couldn’t concentrate or focus on anything. I did not study that day. I went to the spa, and I got a massage and hung out in the jacuzzi all day before coming home, popping some Benadryl and going to bed so that I would get a good rest.

Boy was I a wreck the morning on. When I arrived to the testing center my stomach was all in knots. I couldn’t sit still. The building wasn’t open yet, so I decided to run around the building and up and down some stairs in order to try and burn off some of the pent up energy. I must have looked like a loon, and that didn’t even work. Once I sat down though I calmed down. The exam started. It looked exactly like the practice exams I had been taking at home, and it felt very familiar.

So, I’m taking my exam and it’s really easy. Beyond easy- and I start to panic. I think I must be doing horribly because there’s no way this test is supposed to be this easy. Then my screen shut down. I answered seventy five questions; you either get seventy five questions because you passed or because you royally messed up. Of course I thought the latter and I went home and I cried all day. I was literally depressed from February eleventh to the fourteenth. On the morning of the fourteenth, I woke up at three in the morning and I checked the boards. I saw my named, screamed, cried and went dancing all over the house. I’m pretty sure I scared the living daylights out of my husband, but from that day forward my life was forever changed.

My name is Sarah, and I’m a Registered Nurse!
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And, in an interesting turn of events, I am guest-blogging on Sarah's blog today as well!  Head over to Charting New Territory and read my post on balancing my career and my husbands!