I Passed my boards!

I did it!  I passed the NCC boards!  I’m officially a Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner.  I’m so relieved, excited and mostly importantly happy that the exam is a thing of the past.  As I was studying, I was looking all over the internet for a blog post talking about the exam or someone sharing their experience.  I found hardly anything so I definitely wanted to share a little bit here on how I prepped for the NCC certification exam for Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner.

First things first, I went to school all while I worked full time, had my baby (I did take 1 year off) and kept up with home duties.  Yes, it was a lot – yes there were plenty of times I wanted to quit but I had a great support system and I actually went to school with my best friend so that made the hard times easier.  I graduated in January of this year and I sat for the exam in August.  I waited so long because I was scared to take the exam.  Personally, I never felt like this about an exam.  I usually just study some, take the exam and do well.  This time around I was a big bag of nerves, I kept putting it off until I finally said this is enough JOI pull up your big girl panties and take the damn exam.  So I borrowed my friends notes (she had already passed), grabbed the Midwifery & Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner Certification Review Guide (I used the 2nd edition but the 3rd is available) and an empty notebook and got to work.  I studied for about a week and a half when ever I got a chance.

My method of studying for the NCC certification exam for Women’s Health NP was simple.  I reviewed the notes I was given by organizing them into categories, they were not in any particular order at all.  So by going through them and rewriting the information I retained it.  Then about two days before the exam my handwritten notebook was full of all the notes I needed and I just reviewed and reread through the notebook.  I also did a few questions that you can access with the code that comes with the book, looking back it was not extremely helpful to do the questions.  Instead, I would just recommend going over the outline in the book.  The biggest advice I could give would be to know your normals and know the common abnormals.  I’ll probably do another post about the NCC Exam if anyone is interested and depending on how much traffic this gets.