My first week at university.

So I think I'll add bits as the week goes on, rather than keep posting.

Monday

8.30am: A group of us from my cohort arranged to meet at the train station early this morning, there were like 20 of us standing by the coffee shop! lol.

9.25am: The 'talk' started. There were around 300 of us in the lecture hall! We were in with adult, child and mental health nursing and the talk was actually quite nursing based and all the usual 'welcome to our uni' stuff. They basically repeated all the info from the open day, selection day, website, prospectus, offer letters etc lol so I was pretty much falling asleep.

11am: The midwives were seperated from the nurses. There were nearly 100 of us midwives! I think we're the biggest cohort in the UK. We got a more midwifery focused talk which was lovely and I think most of us then felt a bit more 'into it'. We were then given out our information packs and because there were so many of us we got allocated slots for enrolling and measured for our uniforms. My slot was the last slot of the day, which had me nearly in tears - just the fact that I had to sit around for 3 hours doing nothing whereas if I had had an earlier slot I could have come home and seen my babies. But you just gotta suck it up I guess.

12am/pm? I never know which one 12 midday is. Had lunch, sat with a few midwives I had already met who are all lovely so that was fine, we sat and chatted and it was a nice break actually.

3pm: Went to enrol. I used a random snapshot of me and cut my head out and put it on a white background on photoshop. The lady who was enrolling me laughed and said it was a great pictures and showed it to her colleages - how embaressing lol! Then we collected our ID cards.

3.30pm: Checked out the library and the building in general as we had not bothered going on the campus tours.

4pm: went into our uniform fitting (we snuck in early as we all wanted to go home early lol). The uniforms were tiny, a couple of people had to go up 4-5 dress sizes! I was lucky I only went up 1-2 sizes haha. Actually as I'm typing this I've just realised that I ordered the wrong uniform. Pants. I wanted 3 tunics and 1 dress. But I think I accidently said more dresses. Argh!

4.45pm: got on the train, and then the bus home. The bus was free as I don't have a travelcard yet and I only had a £10 note and the driver didn't have change, woohoo!

5.30pm: Legged it from the bus stop to my house to see my babies!

Tuesday

11am: We found out our placement hospitals. I was so immensely grateful to have been allocated my first choice hospital. Some people got their FOURTH choice, so as I said, I cannot express how relieved I feel knowing I got where I want to be. After this we had 'ice breakers' answering questions at the front of the room like 'what did you do before this?'. Had a huge talk on the NMC - which means I'm now going to be deleting a lot of old blog posts and probably wont ever post anything very interesting.

2pm: More talks about the course, recieved our handbooks etc. Not much else to report. Missed my kids loads, nearly cried again.

5.45pm: Got home, and managed to jog instead of run from the bus stop today to see them lol.

Wednesday:

8.30am: Getting ready to leave. Weird, emotional day today as my boyfriend had his last day at work yesterday and from today has become a stay at home daddy for our children, so that I can go to uni to persue my dreams!

10am: Collected our folder with our clinical skills information for the year from the admin building then had to walk to the uni campus

11am: Two hours of watching birth videos and discussing what we were watching, which was really interesting. Sure, I've seen a billion birth videos but they never get old, and I nearly always tear up. I found the following discussions more interesting than the videos themselves. I completely respect other peoples opinions, but I have to admit I was actually surprised how different many opinions were... I quite naively thought 'hey, we're all going into the same thing, we probably all have the same opinions'... well that is very much NOT the case and I guess I will have to get used to that.

2.30pm: Arrived home, as wednesday is half day. Managed to walk from the bus today rather than running or jogging. Was weird arriving home to my boyfriend, who had tidied, cleaned, hoovered, and then tonight made me a packed lunch for the morning? Very strange behaviour...

Thursday

9.30am arrived nice and early to have another talk about rules and conduct - social networking, plagerism etc etc.

11am 2 hour talk about health and safety, moving and handling, back care etc.

1.30pm Got the train home, we finished early! Yay. Went to meet my family to spend the afternoon out together in the sunshine, make the most of our free time before my real work load begins.