A culture that (surprisingly) fascinates me here in Butte Montana, is the Nursing program at Montana Tech. At first glance I would have assumed these students to be very similar to an Engineering student on campus. With this view, using the nursing program for this assignment would not have been acceptable. It wasn’t until one of my colleague’s wife started as a freshman in the nursing program this fall that I realized just how different the culture in Petroleum Engineering is compared to the Nursing program.

My first surprise was the competitiveness within the pre-nursing program. Only a certain percentage of the students from Pre-Nursing are admitted into the Nursing program so rather than a sense of unity among the classmates, this is replaced by a full blown competitive spirit. School to me always seemed to be something that was tough to get through, but would be impossible without a good support system of instructors and fellow students. I can honestly see myself not passing the Nursing program, even though many people would consider engineering to be a more difficult program to succeed in.

Another surprise presented itself to me when a friend in the Nursing program decided to host a Pampered Chef party at her house. She invited me and told me to bring any other girls I knew. I assumed because she was in the nursing program she would have numerous girl friends that would be attending the party so I wasn’t too concerned with searching for other girls to bring (I myself, don’t have a large network of girlfriends in Butte coming from the Petroleum Engineering program). I showed up with three other girlfriends to find that the only other guests were her elderly neighbor/landlord, and one classmate from her program. When I expressed my surprise, she explained that because of the competitive program, most girls don’t develop inner-program friendships. This struck me as unusual. Some of my best friends now are college classmates, former and present.

Dissimilarity, and definitely something foreign to me, is using memorization as the primary technique school studies. As an Engineering student memorizing is usually something that is not required from many instructors, rather it is more important to know where to find referenced information, and how to use the information to make sense of the problem. Nursing is a program where every aspect of the human body must be learned and memorized, along with symptoms, ailments, and treatments. This is something I would have large amounts of trouble with (I dropped out of high school biology class just to avoid this very study technique).

On the surface it can appear to an outsider that the nursing program and the engineering programs at Montana Tech are quite similar, however upon closer observation one can see that there are many major differences. There are many more areas of the nursing program culture that I plan on exploring, especially learning some of the key aspects of the nursing language. Stay tuned….