Happy to answer. As best I can tell, not really, at least before entering the program of study. (My daughter is currently in nursing school and I attended many open houses and informational sessions with her, etc.) I suspect, though, that this is why many of the programs require a high GPA to get in, because they want people who've presumably researched the field and shown they can complete the work, that type of thing. They also spend the first year and a half plugging away at some tough courses that a lot don't actually pass, which weeds out some of the people who don't really strive to be there. Those who remain seem to get it by the time they start their clinicals second semester sophomore year, and that's really when they start talking more about nursing as a career, how to properly take care of patients, what's expected of the professional nurse, what the Nurse Practice Act is all about, etc.
I was a little surprised that many of the academics who teach required science courses, and even many people responsible for who they admit to the programs, are not nurses. They only start interacting with nurses when they hit their clinicals and upper level nursing courses. And the clinical nurses are generally still pretty close to the bedside. Part of the clinical instruction in the hospital setting is taking care of patients, but they also set aside time in their day for discussion of cases and ethics and all of that, and I imagine those types of talks come up, but the burnout factor probably really won't hit until you work somewhere, on your own, because up up to that point you're pretty protected. I always talk to new nurses about why they chose nursing and I'm surprised at the number of people who say they didn't actually know any nurses, they just liked the medical setting or had an experience themselves or with a family member in the hospital, so they wouldn't necessarily have heard, either, about how things can be from the bedside. But there are many nurses who are children of nurses so they've heard from their parents and in some ways lived the life, too, of what a nurse's life can be like. But a lot of it probably falls to discussions like this with other people who have experience in the field, and later, on the job experience. In some ways I was glad to have had that bad experience in my first job. It helped me appreciate what I had when I went to a better place.
