Sacred Heart Hospital School of Nursing - Carmen Sylva Yearbook (Allentown, PA)

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To and fro life's shuttles go, and with the passing of another year 61-iw Sacred Heart Ci3e.rme1xSylOe.E: 'EI QI Cllllass Bunk lletture We are again confronted with a request to contribute an article for your nurses' class boolc. What shall it be that may be of interest and profit, or possibly both? Many subjects naturally crowd for discussion, all pertinent to nurses, and especially to those about completing their course of training. Yet each have so many by-paths that a choice between them becomes no easy matter. However, gradual elimination narrows our thought to such as seem especially worthy of elaboration. Your standardized course of training is nearly completed, and with a sigh of relief everyone of you look forward to freedom from the restraints imposed during the three years of your training. Each one longs for the time when no longer will be felt the many annoyances thrown about you, together with the inflexible power of a seemingly unnecessary discipline. Perhaps the repetition of these by your superiors from year to year has calloused you to their real significance. Yet yours is not a new experience nor one recognized- only by yourselves. For it is common to all of us to smart under the many restrictions incident to training. This applies to every work trade or profession, and not to your own alone. Before you can hardly realize the same, you will be suddenly pre- cipitated from the collective discipline of the training school, to find yourselves afloat in the sea of your chosen profession. You think you will be free to do as you pleaseg actuated now only in greater or lesser degree by an acquired self-discipline-that so much needed and all- important lesson of life. Has the seed fallen on fertile soil during your training and developed into a self-imposed potential influence? -Many factors and combinations of such will enter into your success or failure, but the degree of self-discipline you have acquired will ever remain not the least of these. Fundamental and guiding principles have been impressed upon you, and collectively you have been led along standardized paths. But now comes the parting of the ways, with each one separately compelled to find her own place in the nursing world. Henceforth you will be an isolated individual nurse, no longer part of a class in the training school. Con- fidence in yourself is essential, yet not the self-satisfied confidence born of false self-assurance. The world very promptly discriminates between the 18

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Sacred Heart Garmen Sylila., SF M2499 r ,A 24 DELIA NILAND HELEN DUFFY Laboratory Supervisor of Maturity 'fc'- KATHRYN KRAMER Social Service Worker 17

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umr Sacred I-Ieatriv cB61 IlX9IXSyl05N' Q., v confidence inspired by true training and knowledge, and that of an arrogate superiority undeservedly assumed. Proper self-confidence and good nursing can be maintained only by the continuation of your studies begun in the training school. Ripened by the understanding of fundamentals and subsequent nursing experience, you will find it possible to grasp more quickly, and more fully to appreciate, the thought and value of any post-graduate studies you may now choose to undertake. And nothing stands out more clearly than this need of continued study after graduation, if a nurse would keep abreast with the development and changes in her profession. Do not dispose of your text-books, but keep them for reference, refreshing your mind with their contained theory and the experience of others, applying these to your daily practice. No books of reference can compare in value to those with which you were acquainted while at school. And all will find how subjects that were hazy before will now unfold, by reason of the ripening effect of your own actual experience. A new and clearer meaning presents itself, and an added interest is aroused to what seemed cold, uninteresting and without real understanding when studied previously. Read, and read not only the science of nursing, but stimulate thought by general reading. Storing up a reserve for meeting and enlivening the humdrum in your daily work. Time denied you for general reading while at school, by reason of apportioned duties, will now present itself. Embrace every such opportunity and even though not so inclined, call into play your acquired power of self-discipline and compel yourself to do so. Appreciation of others' thoughts from your reading, will do much to develop your own. Keep up in current events. Sharpen your wits and make yourself not only technically more efficient, but also a more com- panionable nurse. Learn which are the best nursing journals. Subscribe for them, and then read these, so that you may be up in the contemporary thought of your profession. Changes, though gradual, are oftentimes evident first in the current journals, and unless regularly kept up with, ideas of real progress may pass you by without your knowledge of them or their relative importance. Not only should you read your journals, but read generally and incessantlyg good newspapers, magazines-not neglecting to enjoy the 19