Being a Student Nurse: How I almost got kicked off the course

12 Sep 2011 6 Comments

by littlenursey in Being a student nurse, Experiences, Nurse knowledge, Tips for Student Nurses Tags: advice, assignment, essay, nursing student, progress meeting, student, student nurse, university

There are 2 things I want my fellow student nurses to learn from this post:

1) Don’t try to impress your tutors by going beyond the criteria for a piece of work. You will make it too complicated for yourself, go off track and probably fail.

2) When you submit a piece of work, do everything to make sure that the piece of work has 100%, definitely been submitted.

This is a post about the months of what I can describe as student-nurse hell I went through after failing an essay twice and not being cautious enough when using online submission software. It is a long post, but worth reading if you are worried about going through the same thing and want to understand the process a lot more.

The dreaded essay:
Back in September 2010 I was given an essay to complete and submit before Christmas. The criteria of the essay was to choose a continuing care need of a patient I had cared for, and talk about the assessment tools used to cater for this need. I chose a patient I cared for during my district nursing placement who had Parkinson’s disease and needed help with taking his medication.

Long story short, I ignored the part of the criteria that stated that I only needed to discuss ONE continuing care need, and wrote about several. I failed the essay with a very low grade, and the marker wrote that I hadn’t followed the criteria by sticking to one need and that I had completely wandered off topic. They were of course right. I cried when I read the result of the essay.

The 2nd failed attempt:
So I attended a few re-submission sessions and discussed my essay from start to finish, and completely changed the essay. I don’t submit essays early – we were advised to use up as much time as possible before the deadline to make sure an essay is satisfactory. I made the mistake of using up time until 3.30am, which was 8.5hrs before the 12pm deadline. I was also starting an early shift 4hrs later at 7.30am.

I submitted the essay online through the system my university uses (we cannot submit work by hand at my uni) and the usual window popped up saying like ‘Thank you, your essay was submitted successfully”. I went to bed straight away.

My original plan was to read my essay (which I had emailed to myself) one more time during my break on placement, a few hours before the 12pm deadline. This way I could make sure I was happy with it, or edit it and re-submit it again, as we are allowed to re-submit essays as many times as we want to before a deadline. The ward I was working on at the time was unfortunately insanely busy and I didn’t get a break that day. After my shift, I went home and got changed, then went straight back out to spend the evening taking my grandmother shopping. I got home at 8pm and turned on my laptop to check my emails. There was no email to confirm that my essay had been submitted.

Alarm bells started ringing.

I always received those confirmation emails around 10mins after essay submissions anyway, but never this many hours. I thought back and realised that I didn’t bother waiting for that email and just blindly turned off my laptop and went to bed. I didn’t have a smart phone at the time to alert me of emails. I just went to sleep without a thought.
I logged onto the online submission system again to see what it said about my essay. “This essay has not been completed. Late admissions are not allowed for this assignment”. Meaning that my essay had not gone through the system and that I had automatically failed it. I panicked, rang my brother who is an expert with software, then decided to email my personal tutor. I told her exactly what happened, and I received a quick reply simply stating that I shouldn’t panic and that she has contacted the exams board to see if my essay was submitted after all.

The invitation:
Three months later (no exaggeration), I finally received the email I thought I was never going to get as months had already passed by – an invitation to a Progress Meeting. This meeting meant I needed to go uni, go in a board room with my nursing portfolio and any sufficient evidence to explain why I failed the essay and face four people. One being the nursing programme director, one being the examinations officer, one being the chairman of the board and one being the assessments administrator. Scary stuff huh?
Scary enough to make me cry a lot when I read the email. Yes, I am soft.

I was given one week to arrange a meeting with my personal tutor, work on my portfolio which had been neglected, meet with student support and gather any evidence together. I couldn’t even meet with my personal tutor until the day before my meeting, my portfolio meant spending days gathering all my work together and printing it all off at the library with Kov (my boyfriend) who had to help me arrange it into folders, I needed to write as many reflections as I could to put with my two years worth of work, student support couldn’t help me whatsoever and I had to carry on going on placement and getting with other assignments at the same time.

The worst part:
The two days before my meeting I couldn’t face going into placement. I met with my personal tutor the day before, who managed to put my mind at ease. The good news was that she didn’t believe that they would remove me from the course because  it was my first progress meeting, I had passed everything else that year and I have never been a troublesome student.
The bad news was that there was no one available to go into the meeting with me. At a progress meeting you are allowed to bring one other professional body with you, such as a registered nurse who can back you up, your personal tutor or someone from student support. Absolutely none of these people were available for me and I had to face the fact that I was going in alone.

Later on that night I was in my bedroom with Kov packing my portfolio and making sure I had printed everything I needed. I started feeling nervous as I knew it was getting closer. I began choosing what to wear for the meeting when I recognised the old feelings of a panic attack creeping in. Choosing clothing suddenly became the most stressful task and I couldn’t breathe! I had my panic attack on the floor in front of a pile of clothes, like a drama queen. Thank God I had Kov there to get down on the floor with me and give me a cuddle! He said all the right words in a soothing way and managed to calm me down. I don’t think I thought about it as much afterwards and managed to get some sleep.

The meeting:
My meeting was at 3pm on a Wednesday. I arrived early with Kov, who was there to keep me company while I waited and to comfort me after if all went wrong. Another friend of mine was there for the same meeting with her personal tutor and was scheduled before me. There was another student who went in soon after we arrived. The room we were waiting in was really quiet and I had butterflies all the time we were waiting. The first student came out crying and was very upset. She failed her essay because she was doing the degree and had financial problems, so was working an extra job at the time. The board wanted evidence of her financial problems and that she was working an extra job, but she didn’t know how to find it. She was given a week to provide the evidence.
My friend went in next, with a doctor’s note of evidence that she’d been having problems with her health. She came out of the room after a few minutes with her personal tutor and they cheered “YES!” and hugged. She got through. She came over to me and wished me luck, told me to let her know how it goes.

I was then called in by a man who I had never seen before. I lugged my big heavy bag containing two ring binders full of work  that I had frantically gathered and put together over the past few days, and my laptop in its case in the other. Kov looked more nervous than I did.
The table was huge and I felt really far away from the members of the meeting. The assessments administrator was there to write down everything that we said, which felt very strange and unreal. Luckily I knew two of the other members from lectures and knew that they were very friendly.

They asked me if I knew why I was at the meeting and to explain why I failed the essay. I told them all about how I thought I submitted the essay and how I discovered I hadn’t. I knew it was a technical error on their end, but they don’t accept this as an excuse and I had no proof of it.
They asked if I was under any sort of stress at the time which was a big question. I found myself telling them all about very personal problems I had been having at home and how I had ended up staying at my boyfriend’s for most of the time. I cried… again. Unfortunately there was no proof of any of this whatsoever and they explained that I needed to bring hard evidence of any other problems I had been having. I told them that I didn’t have any and I really couldn’t think if anything else. I mentioned that I had been trying to get our of my overdraft and they suddenly looked up at me. “Overdraft is the magic word’” the chairman said, and he asked me to bring in evidence to prove that I had been in my overdraft as this would indicate financial problems. I was given a week to provide this and left the meeting feeling neither good or bad. Kov was there waiting for me and looking more nervous than anyone else in the room.

When I got home I realised that I did in fact have proof of other problems – I had letters proving that I had been to have a scan on my foot which I had injured and had been having problems with for more than a year. I had a letter from Capital One stating that I had been having problems paying back my debt to them and offering help. I went to my GP surgery and asked the practice nurse to write a note for me to state that I had been having appointments with them regarding my foot, and that I had also attended A&E over it. I printed out all the bank statements to show that I was over a third into my overdraft for months. All of this happened during the time I was struggling with the essay which was, funnily enough, good news. I went back to uni a few days after the meeting and handed all this evidence in.
The week after I received an email to confirm that my evidence was accepted as mitigation and that I was able to continue on the course and able to submit the essay again as a new first attempt! I can say that I was absolutely ecstatic and couldn’t wait to tell everyone.

I worked on the essay again and changed a lot of it as I felt I knew more at this point, and submitted it successfully. A month later I received the results to say that I had passed it. I think I smiled a lot that day. It meant I had completely passed 2nd year.

So here I am now, about to begin 3rd year and putting this all behind me, although I can say that I have learned a LOT of lessons from my experience. It felt like it dragged on forever and it really knocked my confidence. I am very nervous about failing anything again and never want to end up in a progress meeting again. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be but it knocked me so much and made me realise that I did not want to be anything else other than a nurse.

There are some things you can do to avoid ending up where I was:
1) Read the criteria, understand it, stick to it. If you can’t do any of those, speak to the tutors who gave you the assignment.
2) Start assignments ASAP! Don’t abandon it for weeks or you’ll end up losing track, and obviously, don’t start them at the last-minute.
3) Make full use of your tutors – at my uni we are able to send tutors a 500 word draft of our essay 2 weeks before the deadline. Do this. If you are struggling with ANY element of an assignment you should tell them and ask for help. Pester them as much as you need to – they are there to help you. This is a good tip.
4) Get your friends from your course to proof read your work. Get someone who isn’t a student nurse to proof read it too – see if they can understand it from an outsider point of view.
5) Don’t just submit work a week or 2 before the deadline and then leave it like that – use those last few weeks to make sure you’re completely happy with your work and keep working on it. There is always room for improvement.
6) Back up your work!! Email copies to yourself. Never trust your computer to behave itself.
7) When you submit that assignment make damn sure it is submitted! Make sure the system tells you that it has gone through, make sure you get the email to confirm it, and keep checking to make sure nothing has failed. Do all this way before the deadline so if anything does go wrong, you have time to contact university and tell them about any technical problems.
8) If you fail an essay, attend the re-submission sessions. This is the best thing you can do if you fail.
9) If you are having problems with health, relationships or finances, keep all proof of it. You will need them to get through a progress meeting.
10) Lastly, don’t just try to get through everything alone. If you need support, get it, whether it’s from your tutors, student support, family or friends.

Good luck with your studies! I hope none of you end up here but if you do, my advice is not to panic and to try to get yourself organised straight away. If you need any advice or have any questions about this post please let me know!