By Tom Interval and Erica Lloyd
When Paula Laurenson says she’s stressed, she means it.
The 53-year-old single mother, a nursing student at La Roche College in the North Hills, raises a teenager, works full-time and helps care for her 77-year-old mother, all while maintaining a 3.75 grade point average. As a parent of three college students and one high-school student, Laurenson wants to set a good example.
“You’re trying to be a good role model,” she said. “You want to do well so your kids do well, and this puts pressure on you.”
Diane Cox, associate professor of nursing at La Roche, would like to help reduce the pressure people like Laurenson feel. Cox is examining how stress affects the health and academic performance of adult female nursing students as part of her doctoral dissertation for the nursing program at the University of Pittsburgh.
Although it wasn’t the impetus for her study, Cox has felt the stress of juggling multiple roles herself. After she received her BSN from La Roche in 1983, she was one of the first students to enroll in La Roche’s master of science in nursing program. While pursuing her studies, the mother of two was a community educator and nursing supervisor for Suburban General Hospital as well as an adjunct faculty member at La Roche.
“School, for many nursing students, is only one component of their lives,” said Cox. “They don’t have the luxury of being only students. They increasingly have stress and pressures from the job; they have family responsibilities; they have multiple roles.”
“Because ours is a BSN-degree-completion program,” said Sally McCarthy, manager of nursing enrollment at La Roche, “91 percent of the students are nontraditional-aged learners with many priorities outside of school.”
Cox said the turmoil in their field can make it more difficult for student nurses to concentrate on their studies. “The changes in healthcare mean that nurses are taking on expanded roles,” she said. “But in this transitional period, some students have lost their jobs or have lost tuition assistance. These are big issues for them and can compound their stress.”
Cox maintains that what is stressful for one student is not necessarily stressful for another. “It’s an individual appraisal process. People perceive and manage stress differently. For example, if a class is assigned a project, six students may see it as a challenge, and four may be anxious about it, and they’re all going to adopt different coping strategies.”
How some students always seem to meet their demands while others have problems doing so fascinates Cox, and was the catalyst for her study. She surveyed four groups of female RN students who have returned to school to pursue baccalaureate degrees in BSN programs in western Pennsylvania. Cox said the information she hopes to glean from her study could be used by nurse educators to help students identify coping strategies and to “negotiate their demands” so that they can finish their degrees successfully.
“If we lost them, we can’t help them,” said Cox. “As faculty, there may be something we can do to restructure the environment so that it will be less stressful for them.”
Because so many La Roche students are returning students (60 percent of the total student body), the college has a history of attempting to create a learning environment that helps students manage their many priorities, according to McCarthy.
“If they don’t have to search for parking spaces and if they can register for courses by fax, phone or mail, their life is going to be that much less stressful. The little things can mean a lot to busy adult students. Diane’s research is a natural extension of La Roche’s efforts to be sensitive to their needs.”
Cox wants to make the classroom less stressful, but her students shouldn’t expect to get out of doing papers for her. She describes herself as “empathetic” and “flexible” in trying to understand her students’ demands; yet she said she won’t compromise her standards or the quality of her students’ education.
“She has high expectations of her students,” said Laurenson. “She is really interested in having nursing elevated to its proper status.”
Keeping good students like Laurenson, said Cox, benefits everyone. “If nursing doesn’t attract the best and the brightest, we’re all at a disadvantage.”
