The usefulness of tutorials

Whenever you are asked to submit an assignment for university, you also get told the name of the tutor who will be marking the work. You can contact this person and ask to have a tutorial with them - you can then take along a first draft of your work for their comments and suggestions.

Once you have the marked work back you can then request another tutorial to discuss your marks (in addition to the comments you get back with the marked work).

Well I'm glad I took advantage of this today. Previously I have undertook science and social science courses and didn't think writing essays for a nursing course would be any different for a nursing course. It is.

It was only through talking about my assignment that I began to understand why. Nursing is evidence based so your essays need to be strongly evidence based. You need to use at least 10 different pieces of evidence from journals, government websites, topic based books and lobby groups (websites such as BHF etc). Social science courses need a lot less. But that isn't to say your whole work needs to be essays - about 1/3 of it perhaps.

I have decided to make a series of help sheets such as essay tick lists for reflective essays, literature reviews and informative essays.

Also evidence needs to be recent and age related. For example - my reflective essay is based on a teen and my evidence was for a child, therefore I had irrelevant evidence.

I am so glad I sought out these tutorials and strongly recommend anyone to do the same.

Back on track

I had a meeting with my programme manager who suggested that, as I still sounded wheezy and couldn't return to a ward environment that I should go back to my GP and get another sick note.

She also agreed that I can't go on any placements until my chest is clear - which I will know once I've had the chest X-ray. Watching day time TV was boring but I also spent a lot of time working on 2 essays which are due for submission soon.

I didn't get a very good mark for my practice essay - only 40% because I didn't use enough quotes. I'm disappointed at this so I've booked a tutorial with my marker (in university you get a different , named assignment marker for each assignment you do and you can book tutorials with them before and after they have marked your work) to get advice on how to improve. I have also booked appointments with the markers of my other 2 essays as I want the scores to be better.

We've a poster presentation soon so I know I've got that to prepare. My mam wants to take my children out for the day on saturday so that will give me time to get the essays sorted at least.

It was disappointing missing most of my first placement - I feel like a student rather than a student nurse, I still don't have most of my energy back but I know this will take time, in the mean time I have discovered apple flavour lucozade lol. At least I can continue on the course with the good friends I have made.