By Ryan Otteson | Reporter
As pre-nursing students navigate their transition from Waco to Dallas, they face challenges with a different pace of learning, new housing and finding ways to get involved in organizations all while staying connected with the Waco campus.
Director of Student Services at the Louise Herrington School of Nursing Keith Wickliffe said his role is aiding the transition for new students and providing support for them outside of the classroom. Faculty also provide students with a handbook to help them navigate everything about life while in nursing school.
A team of faculty is dedicated to this kind of support including a chaplain, academic support, financial aid personnel and people like Wickliffe who help with student organizations and activities. He also works closely with staff in Waco to ensure pre-nursing students are getting the specific services they need.
“We have staff down there that do advising for students that are in pre-nursing, and we’re in close connection with those advisers,” Wickliffe said. “They are part of my team actually, so the advisers down in Waco are part of student services.”
Even though Wickliffe is involved with getting students connected to organizations on campus, he said there is tension between getting involved in Dallas and staying connected to Waco life.
“We also want students to feel connected to Baylor, and so we want students to be able to go back to Waco and participate in things,” Wickliffe said. “Especially in the fall, football games are a big deal, so we try to help students figure out how they can balance [that].”
Springfield, Ill. junior and nursing student Maya Goswami described what it is like to balance nursing school while staying connected to the Waco campus.
“I would say the first semester starting was really, really hard because you kind of hit the ground running,” Goswami said. “It’s kind of go, go, go in nursing school so it was really hard to want to adjust to being in Dallas and not with friends from Waco.”
However, she still comes to Waco about one weekend a month to be with friends, and feels like being in Greek life has provided opportunities to come back for certain events.
Goswami also said that there are two different types of days in nursing school, lecture days and clinical days.
“On a lecture day, we’re usually in class anywhere from 8 [a.m.] to 2 or 4 [p.m.], so it’s a really long day of lecture and that’s pretty much all we do that day. And then we’ll just come home and chill,” Goswami said.
As the students progress through their levels in coursework, they get more days off. Goswami said it is a chaotic schedule, but it is nice to not have school on some of the days.
“We’ll have clinical days, which is like days in the hospital, not in the school, so those days are 12 hours,” she said. “They’re from 6:30 [a.m.] to 6:30 [p.m.] just shadowing nurses and practicing skills with patients and all that stuff.”
Goswami said that nursing school takes up a lot of her time, but she enjoys getting to serve patients and spend her free time with her roommates and their golden retriever Wallace.
