The part of nursing school essays nobody warns you about

Everyone talks about the personal statement for nursing school applications but not about the reflective essays you'll write constantly once you're actually in the program.

Reflective writing in nursing is its own skill. You're not just describing what happened during a clinical, you're analyzing your own decision making, identifying what you'd do differently, and connecting it to theory. That combination of personal and academic is harder than either one alone.

What helped me was treating the reflection like it has two layers. First layer is what happened and what I did. Second layer is why I made those choices and what I now understand that I didn't before. The second layer is the actual essay. The first layer is just context.

Most people write a lot of layer one and almost no layer two and then wonder why the feedback says "lacks depth."