What I learned from high school was not to let other people tell you that you cannot achieve what you want to in your life. Listen to people who are going to encourage you, not beat you down.
I spent seven years of my childhood, ages 10-17 living in a place that I absolutely hated. It was a geographical state that my family had no business moving to. I attended two different high schools. The first three years of high school were spent living in this horrible state. I never felt like I fit in. Ever. My grades were mediocre. On the outside I looked like a girl that didn’t care about her academic career. On the inside I was a girl who was hurting. When I was 15 years and nine months old, I asked my guidance counselor for a work permit so I could work at McDonalds and she told me that working at McDonalds was all I was going to accomplish in my life. That guidance counselor’s words were amongst the meanest words spoken to me up to that point and I had never felt so worthless and insecure.
A year later we moved to a different geographical state and I spent my senior year at a new high school. My new guidance counselor asked me what I wanted out of my life and helped me to develop an education plan to get there. I followed the plan according to his suggestions and I became a nurse.
Two different guidance counselors, two different approaches. The mean guidance counselor could have destroyed me had I chose to listen to her or stayed at that school. I do not credit her for my success.
On a lighter note, the most useful skill and my favorite thing I learned in high school was how to type. Unforeseen circumstances led me into two typing courses. Do you have a paper to write Jen? No problem because you know how to type. Did knowing how to type help you on busy days when you were assigned to triage when you worked in the emergency department? It sure did. Do you smile when you type, because you know how to type? Yes!
thatnursewrites 