Tim Turner

Journey’s end: Nursing students may miss out on the lazy days of university life, says Tim Turner, but by the end of their courses they will not want to leave

For many students life at university is a three-year beer festival punctuated by the odd exam. Nursing students, however, tend to have a different experience. They get all the bad bits of student life such as poverty and big assignments, and few of the nice bits such as lazy days in bed and ten-hour working weeks. No wonder nursing students gaze with envy at their peers in media studies. Working in a stressful clinical environment for 40 hours a week brings exhaustion in inverse proportion to the size of their wage packet.