I want to tell you the moment I knew I was going to make it through nursing school.
It wasn’t a high test score. It wasn’t a particular professor’s encouragement. It was 11pm on a Tuesday, in a borrowed apartment kitchen, when three of my classmates and I were drinking bad coffee and crying laughing because we’d all just realized we’d been studying the wrong chapter for an exam the next morning.
And in that moment, surrounded by women who were exactly as exhausted and terrified as I was, who would still show up for that exam in eight hours, who would pass it together and graduate together and go on to be remarkable nurses — I knew I was not alone.
That feeling, more than any technique or test-prep tool, is what I want to give you today. Because preparing for the NCLEX is a famously isolating process, and I want to convince you that it doesn’t have to be.
The nurses who get through hard things, get through them together. The myth of the lone striver is killing us.
The Loneliness of Prep
By the time you reach NCLEX prep, you’ve often graduated and dispersed. The classmates you saw every day are scattered across cities and shifts and life events. You’re studying alone, often in your own home, often at hours when no one is awake.
And NCLEX prep is uniquely isolating because the stakes feel so personal. You’ve been told this exam is up to you. Your success or failure is yours to own. Other people can support you, but no one can take it for you.
All of that is technically true. And yet, the research on learning, motivation, and resilience consistently shows: humans do hard things better in community. Cognitive load is distributed. Emotional regulation improves. Accountability sharpens. Hope is contagious.
The lone striver is a myth. The successful nurse — and the successful test-taker — is part of an ecosystem.
The Shadow Side of Nursing Culture
I want to be honest about something, because pretending it doesn’t exist won’t help you.
Nursing has a documented culture problem with lateral violence — the phenomenon of nurses being hard on each other rather than supporting each other. The phrase “nurses eat their young” exists for a reason. Many of you reading this have already encountered it, in clinicals or in your first jobs.
Why does it happen? The research suggests it’s a cascade — overworked nurses with too little institutional support, working in high-stress environments, often without enough emotional safety to feel their own pain. The pain leaks sideways. New nurses get the brunt of it.
This is not your fault, and it does not have to be your future. You can be part of the generation of nurses that breaks the pattern. It starts with how you treat your fellow students right now.
The cure for lateral violence is not just kinder individuals. It’s intentional sisterhood. It’s choosing to lift up the women coming up behind you, beside you, and even in front of you. Even when the culture around you doesn’t model it.
How to Build Your Circle
Find a Study Partner With Different Strengths
The best study partner isn’t your best friend (though they can be). It’s someone whose strengths complement your weaknesses. If pharmacology is your stumbling block and your friend lights up about it, schedule a weekly call where you teach each other your strong suits. Teaching is one of the best ways to consolidate knowledge — and you’ll both win.
Find a Mentor One to Two Years Ahead
Not someone twenty years into their career. Someone who passed the NCLEX in the last twelve to twenty-four months. They remember exactly what it felt like. They have current information. They are usually delighted to help, because helping you is part of how they make sense of what they went through.
Reach out. Email. DM on social media. Most nurses say yes to mentorship requests.
Be Discerning About Online Communities
Online nursing communities can be incredibly supportive — and they can also be sources of comparison, gaslighting, and toxic positivity. The right community helps you study harder and feel more grounded. The wrong one leaves you anxious and depleted.
If a community is full of “I just did 5,000 questions today” posts that make you feel like a failure, leave it. If a community is full of toxic positivity that doesn’t allow you to acknowledge how hard this is, leave it.
Look for communities where people are honest about struggle and concrete in their support.
Let One Person All The Way In
This might be a partner, a parent, a sibling, a best friend. Not everyone needs to know every detail of your prep. But one person should — someone who can hear it when you’re scared, who knows your test date, who will sit with you the night before.
Choose them carefully. And tell them, explicitly, what you need. Most loved ones want to help and don’t know how. “I need you to listen, not problem-solve” is a complete instruction. Use it.
The Rubio Family
I want to be honest about why we built Rubio Board Review the way we did.
My husband and I are both nurse practitioners. We’ve been at the bedside, in primary care, in pain management, in oncology. We’ve seen what happens to nurses without community — burnout, attrition, lateral violence cycles. And we’ve seen what happens to nurses with it — long careers, deep professional satisfaction, real change in patient outcomes.
So when we built this review platform, we built it as more than a content library. We built it as a place to feel less alone. The blog posts. The community. The voice in the materials that knows your name even if we don’t yet — these are intentional. We wanted you to feel us in your corner.
If You Take Nothing Else From This Post: Reach out to one person today. Just one. Tell them where you are in your prep. Ask if they’ll check in on you next week. Build the smallest possible piece of sisterhood. It will compound from there.
A Closing Letter
To the nurse reading this — wherever you are, whatever your story, however close or far you feel to passing this exam:
You are not alone. You are part of a long, unbroken line of women who have done what you are doing — who have studied at kitchen tables and in coffee shops and in cars, who have wept and laughed and quoted potassium ranges in their sleep, who have walked into testing centers with shaking hands and walked out as nurses.
That line goes back generations. It will continue long after you. You are joining it.
And you are joining a present sisterhood, too — every woman currently studying for this exam, every nurse who took it last year, every nurse who took it twenty years ago, every nurse who will take it next month. We are all here, in different rooms, doing the same work, holding each other up across the distance.
Whatever you’re feeling tonight — whatever brought you to this blog post — please know that we are with you. And come find us. We’ve built this platform exactly so you’d have somewhere to go when you needed it.
The door is open.