How To Succeed In Nursing School
You probably already know the usual advice for succeeding in nursing school. Get organized. Use a planner. Don't procrastinate. Go to class. Find a study group. Get enough sleep. All of that can help. But there is another part of succeeding in nursing school that doesn't get talked about nearly as much:
You may have to change the way you learn.
The study habits that helped you earn good grades in anatomy, microbiology, psychology, and your other prerequisite courses may suddenly feel less effective once nursing school begins.
You read the chapter. You watch the lecture. You make flashcards. You memorize the signs and symptoms. You know the medications.
Then you sit down for the exam and it feels completely different from the tests you took before nursing school.
Some questions cover details you didn't realize were important. Others give you a patient situation and ask you to decide what matters most. You may know the disease or medication being tested but still struggle to choose between two answers. And sometimes, you simply realize you didn't know the content as well as you thought you did.
That's part of what makes the transition to nursing school difficult. You still have to learn the content, but now you also have to learn how to use it.
Nursing school asks you to remember a huge amount of new information, recognize which pieces matter, connect findings together, and make decisions about patient care.
That means succeeding in nursing school often requires more than studying harder. It requires learning how to study differently.
1. You Probably Can't Study Everything
One of the first things nursing students notice is the sheer amount of material.
A single week can include several chapters, lecture slides, medications, skills, clinical preparation, assignments, and readings across multiple courses. Trying to study every page, every slide, and every detail with the same intensity isn't realistic.
This is where studying longer isn't always the answer. You have to become more intentional about how you use your time.
Start with what your course is actually emphasizing. Look at the learning objectives. Pay attention to what your instructor spends time explaining in class. Notice concepts that appear in lecture, readings, assignments, and clinical.
Then decide where you actually need to spend your study time.
If you understand a concept well enough to explain it without your notes, you probably don't need another hour of rereading it. Spend that hour on something you still can't explain.
Successful studying isn't about giving every topic equal time. It's about figuring out where your time will make the biggest difference.
2. Rereading Isn't the Same as Studying
Rereading feels productive because it's easy to do. You can spend two hours going through your notes, highlighting your study guide, or clicking through lecture slides and feel like you studied for two hours. And rereading isn't useless. Sometimes you need to go back through material to clarify something you didn't understand or refresh information you haven't seen in a while.
The problem is when rereading becomes your main way of studying. When the information is sitting right in front of you, it's easy to recognize it and think, Yes, I remember this. But recognizing something while you're looking at it is very different from being able to remember it on your own. That's why part of your study time should involve taking the information away.
After you've studied a section, close your notes and see what you can remember. Use a blank sheet of paper and write down everything you know about the topic. Don't worry about making it neat. When you're finished, open your notes and see what you missed.
Try explaining a concept out loud as though you're teaching it to another student. You'll often discover that something you thought you understood becomes much harder when you have to explain it without looking at your notes.
Turn the headings in your notes into questions. Instead of rereading a section titled Complications of Diabetes, cover the information and ask yourself, What complications can occur? What do I remember about each one?
Flashcards can work the same way, but only if you actually make yourself answer before flipping the card. Reading the question and immediately checking the back turns another active study method into passive review.
You can also stop periodically during a study session and ask yourself:
· What are the three most important things I just learned?
· What am I having trouble remembering?
· Could I explain this without looking at my notes?
· What would I probably forget if I didn't review this again?
Then use the answers to decide what you study next. This may feel harder than rereading. That's actually part of the point.
When you have to search your memory for an answer, struggle to explain something, or realize you can't remember a concept you studied yesterday, you're getting useful information about what you actually know. You're also finding those gaps while you still have time to do something about them.
So don't measure a study session only by how long you sat at your desk or how many pages you reviewed. Pay attention to what you can actually remember and explain when the notes are closed.
3. Don't Spend Hours Making Your Notes Pretty
There is nothing wrong with organized notes. But nursing school can make elaborate note-taking very expensive in terms of time.
If you're spending three hours rewriting a one-hour lecture, color-coding every heading, creating perfectly formatted study guides, or copying information from the PowerPoint into another document, ask yourself:
Am I learning right now, or am I organizing?
Sometimes organizing helps you learn. Sometimes it's just organizing. Your notes don't need to contain everything your instructor said. They need to help you return to the material and understand it.
Use abbreviations. Use arrows. Make quick comparisons. Leave space to add something later. Circle what you don't understand. A study guide that looks messy but helps you remember the material is more useful than a beautiful one you spent four hours creating.
4. Cramming May Have Worked Before. Nursing School Is Different.
Waiting until two days before an exam to start seriously studying is especially difficult in nursing school because there is simply too much material. And if you're thinking, I've always studied that way and been successful, you may be right.
Cramming may have worked perfectly well in some of your previous courses. You could spend a long weekend reviewing a few chapters, memorize what you needed for the exam, earn a good grade, and move on to the next unit.
The problem is that nursing school doesn't give you much opportunity to move on. The material starts to build on itself.
What you learn about fluid and electrolytes shows up again when you're learning about medications. What you learned about the cardiovascular system becomes important when you're studying heart failure. Dosage calculations don't disappear after the dosage calculation exam. Skills you learned earlier may show up again in clinical. Information from one course may suddenly become relevant in another.
At the same time, the volume keeps growing. You may be preparing for one exam while attending lectures for the next one, completing assignments for another course, preparing for clinical, learning medications for your patients, and practicing for a skills checkoff.
There is also a difference between remembering something long enough to answer a question on Friday and remembering it well enough to use again three weeks later. Cramming can sometimes get information into your short-term memory quickly. That's one reason it can feel effective, and sometimes it really can produce a decent exam grade.
But if much of that information disappears after the exam, the next unit becomes harder because you're constantly having to go back and relearn material that the course is already building on. That creates a frustrating cycle:
You cram for the exam. You take the exam. You immediately turn your attention to the next exam. Some of the previous material fades. Then it appears again in a later course, clinical, or a cumulative exam and you have to learn it all over again.
A more manageable approach is to have repeated contact with the material over time. That doesn't mean you need marathon study sessions every night. Even 20 or 30 minutes spent reviewing something from earlier in the week can make a difference.
Come back to older material after a few days. Quiz yourself on something you learned last week. Spend a few minutes reviewing medications you've already studied. Before starting today's material, see what you remember from yesterday.
If you realize you've forgotten something, that's not a failed study session. You found it while you still have time to review it. You can still spend more time studying as an exam gets closer. The difference is that those last few days shouldn't be the first time you've seriously worked with most of the material. By exam week, you want to be reviewing, strengthening, and filling in gaps, not trying to learn an entire unit from the beginning.
The study habits that got you through other college courses weren't necessarily bad habits. They may simply have been habits that worked for a different kind of course. And nursing school may be the point where they stop working.
5. Don't Let One Class Consume All of Your Study Time
Exams can sneak up on you quickly. One course feels harder, so you spend most of the weekend studying for it. You have an exam on Monday, so naturally, that becomes your focus. Then Monday comes.
You take the exam, finally look at everything else on your schedule, and realize you have another exam on Thursday, clinical preparation due tomorrow night, and a skills checkoff you haven't practiced for yet.
Now the cycle starts all over again. This is one of the challenges of nursing school that doesn't always get enough attention. You're rarely preparing for only one thing at a time.
You may be taking several nursing courses at once, and each one comes with its own exams, assignments, readings, quizzes, and expectations. Add clinical days, simulation, skills labs, care plans or clinical paperwork, and other required preparation, and your week can fill up very quickly.
That's why managing your time in nursing school isn't just about meeting deadlines. It's also about looking far enough ahead that every deadline doesn't become an emergency. At the beginning of each week, take a few minutes to look at everything that's coming, not just tomorrow.
Look at your:
Exams and quizzes
Clinical days and required preparation
Assignments and due dates
Skills checkoffs or validations
Simulation days
Required readings or modules
Other responsibilities outside of school
Then look one week beyond that. If you have a major exam next Monday, you probably need to start working on that material this week, even if you have other things due first.
This doesn't mean dividing your time equally between every course. Some weeks, one class genuinely will need more of your attention. A difficult exam may deserve several hours while another course only needs a brief review.
The important part is making that choice intentionally. Instead of asking: "What do I have to do tonight?"
Try thinking: "What can I do tonight that will make the rest of this week easier?"
That might mean spending 30 minutes reviewing material for an exam that's still ten days away. It might mean practicing a skill twice tonight instead of waiting until the night before checkoff. It might mean starting your clinical preparation earlier because you already know the evening before clinical will be busy. It might mean finishing a small assignment now so it isn't competing for your attention during exam week.
Small amounts of work done early can keep several responsibilities from piling up at the same time. It also helps to be realistic about how much time nursing school tasks actually take.
If clinical preparation usually takes you two hours, don't keep scheduling it into a 30-minute opening. If reviewing a difficult lecture usually takes an hour, plan for an hour. If you know you're exhausted after a 12-hour clinical day, don't build a study plan that depends on you coming home and studying for four more hours.
A schedule only helps if it's based on how you actually work. And when things don't go according to plan (and they won't always) look at the whole week again and adjust.
One of the easiest ways to feel constantly behind in nursing school is to spend all of your time putting out today's fire while accidentally creating tomorrow's. Sometimes the most important study session isn't for the exam that's two days away.
It's the one that keeps the exam that's ten days away from becoming your next emergency.
6. Pay Attention to What Actually Works for You
Students hear a lot about the "best" way to study nursing. Flashcards. Study groups. Concept maps. Practice questions. Videos. Handwritten notes. Digital notes.
You may have a classmate who swears by making hundreds of flashcards before every exam. Someone else rewrites every lecture by hand. Another student studies exclusively from practice questions. And social media can make it seem like everyone else has a perfectly organized study routine involving color-coded notes, elaborate study guides, and hours of preparation.
It's easy to start wondering if you're studying the wrong way. But there isn't one study method that every nursing student needs to use. A strategy is only useful if it actually helps you learn and remember the material.
That means you have to pay attention to the result, not just the process. If you spend three hours making flashcards, what happens when you actually use them? Can you answer them without looking? Do you remember the information several days later?
If you study with a group, do you leave understanding the material better, or did you spend most of the session talking, comparing notes, and getting distracted?
The same applies to resources. Nursing students have access to an enormous amount of material: textbooks, lecture slides, review books, question banks, videos, apps, study guides, and online resources.
More resources don't necessarily mean better studying. Sometimes they just mean more information to manage. If your instructor's lecture, assigned reading, and one good supplemental resource are helping you understand the material, you may not need five more videos explaining the same topic.
At some point, you have to stop collecting resources and start learning from the ones you already have.
7.The Best Study Method Is One That Helps You Learn
You don't get extra points for having the prettiest notes. You don't get extra points for studying the most hours. And you don't get extra points for using the same study method everyone else seems to be using.
Pay attention to what happens after you study. Can you remember the material without looking at your notes? Can you explain it in your own words? Can you answer questions about it? Do you still remember it several days later?
Those outcomes tell you much more than how many flashcards you made or how many hours you spent at your desk.
Keep the strategies that are helping you learn. Adjust the ones that aren't. And don't be afraid to let go of a study method simply because it's popular.
The best way to study nursing isn't the method that looks the most impressive. It's the one that actually helps you learn the material.
8. You Don't Need a Perfect Nursing School Routine
There isn't one schedule, study method, or set of notes that guarantees success in nursing school. And you don't have to completely reinvent yourself as a student on the first day.
Start by paying attention. What takes up most of your study time? What helps you remember information several days later? What are you repeatedly forgetting? What do you avoid because it's difficult? What are you spending time doing because it feels productive, even though it isn't helping very much?
Nursing school may require you to study differently than you did before. That doesn't necessarily mean studying every waking hour. It means learning how to make the hours you do spend studying count.
