Today was our certificate ceremony with a little celebration afterwards, so it was a pretty exciting day for me.

I already got all my written exam results on Wednesday and I was really surprised how good I was:

• Written exams: day one: 1/A; day two: 2/B; day three: 1/A
• Practical exam: 2/B
• Oral exam: 1/A

For a final score of 1,4 for my exams stand-alone and 1,2 for the theory of all three years of my retraining combined. Together with another classmate, we were awarded as the best male and female new nurse of our year respectively. Each of us got a nice flower and 50€. I never, ever was the best in anything… So currently I am really proud of myself. The only thing we have to wait for is our official nurse title, as this is handled by the state administration office and official documents take time to be printed. I hope we can hold them in our hands by Mid-late September. My mentors/practice instructors from my workplace were at the celebration too and seemed to be really happy about both me and another colleague/classmate passing our final exams.

The biggest part of my class went to eat at a greek restaurant with our teacher after the main celebration was over, which was just a twelve minute drive away. It was nice to wind down with good food, joke around and to revel in memories of the past 3 years.

What’s my plan now? I’ll stay working at my nursing home, just with reduced hours for the first year (30-35 h/week depending on staffing and workload) and then I want to become a mentor/practice instructor myself. For now, I’m so damn satisfied to have mastered a big step up in my career. My emotions are a weird mixture of pride, happiness and satisfaction, but also sentimental melancholia because I’ll most certainly miss a few classmates a lot…