Last year about this time, I received a two-​​year fel­low­ship to study nurs­ing ethics at the uni­ver­sity where I’m pur­su­ing my MSN degree. This fel­low­ship is dif­fer­ent than what I stud­ied as an under­grad: in addi­tion to study­ing a small text­book, we’re expected to delve into an area of nurs­ing and explore it from an eth­i­cal point of view. We meet monthly to dis­cuss our read­ings, our focus areas, and other sub­jects as they came up.

It’s a ton of fun to really get into a sub­ject that I’m pas­sion­ate about. (I plan on writ­ing more about my topic in a future post.) We’re a small group—six under­grad­u­ate stu­dents and me. When we started, they had just begun their nurs­ing stud­ies, and I had one quar­ter of grad school under my belt. A year later and they’re look­ing for­ward to future careers, job place­ment, and of course, the oft-​​dreaded NCLEX, while I’m fully in the swing of grad­u­ate stud­ies. I get such a kick out of spend­ing time with the other fel­lows. While I’m not as sea­soned as some of my col­leagues, it’s still been awhile since I was an under­grad. Hear­ing their joys, frus­tra­tions, wor­ries, and achieve­ments causes me to reflect on my own expe­ri­ences in nurs­ing school.

At the begin­ning of each monthly meet­ing, one stu­dent gives a short open­ing. This Octo­ber was my turn, and I picked an essay by philoso­pher Robert Ful­ghum titled “All I Need to Know I Learned in Kinder­garten.” If you’ve never read it before, I highly encour­age you to give it a read. My point was that in the midst of all of the hus­tle and bus­tle of their senior year, it becomes even more impor­tant to focus on the jour­ney rather than the des­ti­na­tion and to enjoy this spe­cial time in their lives and the expe­ri­ences they will have.

I think this les­son is a good one for all of us. When life gets busy, stress­ful, and crazy (as it often does!), it’s impor­tant to take a moment to savor what we have and where we are on our indi­vid­ual paths. We’ve all come a long way from nurs­ing school, and we each have a lot to be proud of. Each one of my under­grad­u­ate class­mates is bright, car­ing, and capa­ble, and they’re going to go on to become incred­i­ble nurses. I can’t wait to see where each of their jour­neys takes them!