Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Ok, so I need to get better about updating the blog. I get that.
The thing is, I'm having some trouble juggling everything.

I am halfway through my second week of my first semester of nursing school. So far:
We've covered nursing process and theory, dosage calculations, medication administration, insulin and heparin pharmacology/administration/calculations. And in lab (which is really pre-clinical work to make sure we don't screw things up with real patients), we've covered: bed making like a nazi, infection control, medication administration and preparation. All in 6 days.

Interesting things I've learned: "adults" who get pissy when someone else sits in "their" seat are in for quite the shock... They have some growing up to do. The funny thing is, the youngest person in the program is early 20s. These are full-on, established adults..

Also, I've discovered that I'm not scared of giving injections, and I actually like doing the dosage calcs.

Giving a bed bath freaked me out a little bit. It was about a million times worse because the instructor observing me is a Nazi and is very intimidating. She scares the crap out of me. She's not outwardly mean, but I wonder why she teaches because she isn't very patient, and has the attitude that we all suck, and hurry up and figure it out. I'm pretty lucky that my personality allows me to handle criticism without taking it to heart. I just accept it, process the changes, and do it again.

I keep telling myself that she will make me a better nurse in the end (even if her criticism isn't procedural, but personal preference), but she still scares the hell out of me.

The pace of lecture is so fast, even if I were inclined to take notes by hand (I'm not), there's no way I could keep up AND retain anything. So, I've started printing out the PowerPoint lectures, and highlighting the super very most important things, and adding memory triggers or short examples to the sections by hand. I skim the chapters in advance (which doesn't sound like much, but we're assigned 20-30 chapters a week, no kidding), and it doesn't seem like I'm missing anything yet.

I'm not sure how else I can study, or any techniques that I could add or change. A lot of people seem to make flashcards, but that's never worked well for me. I'm not going to bother, since the time investment is huge, and the payoff so small. I started out wanting to follow an SQRR method, but quickly figured out that I cannot go through 20-30 chapters multiple times. And it would be silly to outline, when an outline of the lecture is available from the PowerPoint. I'm open to suggestion, if anyone cares to share any tips with me..

How do/did you study? What would you have changed about it in hindsight?

My caffeine is officially wearing off.. So I'm going to take full advantage.
:-)