The Importance of Clinical and Classroom Skills When I first thought about nursing as a profession, I knew it was not going to be an easy task. Becoming a nurse means that you must retain all the knowledge you have learned during the two and a half years of nursing school to eventually diagnose a patient, reveal symptoms, and ultimately cure the patient. Over the years, I have seen many people struggle as hospital nurses and nursing students while in a nursing program. I know from experience that I don't want a nurse who is unsure of the diagnosis or procedure they are going to perform. The ultimate question is how nursing programs should train students to become nurses. Classroom skills can be defined as being taught by professors, reading textbooks, and taking tests on what they have learned. Not everything a student learns in nursing needs to be stored in the back of your brain. Information learned in nursing will appear in real-world situations. It is therefore important that a student understands the information, but can also use it in real-life situations. Once a student has excelled at a concept, they should be able to practice their skills on a mannequin. Both Coyle and Mitchell described that trial and error is essential (Coyle and Mitchell). However, Coyle stated in his article that there is a difference in error when it comes to real-life situations, which he describes while flying an airplane (Coyle, 2009, p.23-24). This would be an example of a nurse trying to start an IV on a patient, continually blowing into the patient's veins until the arm has no more veins to poke and the arm is completely open. Coyle believed in making the task more difficult when you were practicing it (Coyle, 2009). Coyle also said that you should always work on your ability to do something and be supervised because it makes you want to excel (Coyle, 2009). For example, when a nursing student tries to find a vein to start an IV, the nurse supervises him. After several interventions by the nurse, the student will be able to choose a perfect vein to start an IV. Mitchell disagreed with Coyle because he believed that students did not need constant supervision (Mitchell, 2006). When a student enters the clinical setting, the nursing student is not released on their own. The student learns to interact with patients, learns what to do in certain situations and realizes what he needs to work on. A nursing student should not go through three years of nursing school without clinical practice. The skills the nursing student learned during the first year may have been forgotten. This reflects Coyle's theory that extensive practice must be an important skill to excel at a task (Coyle, 2009). A nursing program should implement skills in a clinical setting for nursing students so they can get a feel for what it will be like when they are