The most valuable subjects to study before nursing school are anatomy and physiology, basic math, medical terminology, and microbiology. These four areas form the foundation of nearly everything you’ll encounter in your first semester, and arriving with even a basic grasp of them puts you significantly ahead. Beyond core academics, there are practical certifications, entrance exam prep, and thinking skills that deserve your attention too.
Anatomy and Physiology
This is the single most important subject to review before day one. Nursing school assumes you can connect what’s happening inside the body to what you’re seeing in a patient, and that connection starts with knowing how major body systems work. Focus on the cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal, and urinary systems. You don’t need to memorize every bone and muscle, but you should understand how blood flows through the heart, how oxygen gets from your lungs to your cells, how the kidneys filter waste, and how the digestive tract breaks down food.
What trips up many first-semester students isn’t the memorization itself but the volume of it. If you spend even a few weeks reviewing organ systems before classes start, you’ll recognize terms in lecture instead of hearing them for the first time. Free resources like Khan Academy’s anatomy series or OpenStax textbooks cover everything at the right level. Pay special attention to how systems interact: the heart and lungs working together, the kidneys regulating blood pressure, the nervous system controlling muscle movement. Nursing exams test application, not just recall, so understanding why the body responds a certain way matters more than labeling a diagram.
Medical Terminology
Medical language looks intimidating, but it follows a logical system. Most clinical terms are built from three parts: a prefix, a root word, and a suffix. Learn the pattern and you can decode terms you’ve never seen before.
Start with the prefixes you’ll encounter constantly. “Hyper-” means excessive or above normal, “hypo-” means below or deficient, “tachy-” means rapid, “brady-” means slow, and “dys-” means painful or abnormal. Root words tell you which body part is involved: “cardi/o” refers to the heart, “nephr/o” to the kidney, “neur/o” to nerves, “gastr/o” to the stomach, “pneum/o” to the lungs, and “hemat/o” to blood. So “tachycardia” breaks down to rapid (tachy-) heart (cardi-) condition (-ia). “Dyspnea” means difficult or painful breathing.
You don’t need to memorize hundreds of terms before school starts. Focus on the 30 to 40 most common prefixes, roots, and suffixes. Once you internalize the system, new vocabulary in lectures will feel like puzzle pieces clicking together rather than a foreign language.
Math for Dosage Calculations
Nursing math isn’t advanced, but it needs to be precise. You’ll calculate medication dosages, convert between measurement systems, and work with IV fluid rates. The core skills are fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, and proportions. If any of these feel rusty, brush up now.
The metric system is essential. It’s organized in units of 10, so conversions involve moving a decimal point left or right. You’ll convert between milligrams and grams, milliliters and liters, and sometimes between metric and household measurements (like teaspoons to milliliters). A technique called dimensional analysis is the standard method taught in most programs. It works by multiplying a given measurement by a fraction equal to 1, stepping from one unit to the target unit. For example, if a medication comes in milligrams per milliliter and you need to give a dose in milligrams, you set up the problem so units cancel out and you’re left with the volume to administer.
One important rule: don’t round until you reach your final answer. Rounding mid-calculation can introduce errors that matter when you’re dealing with medications. Practice with free dosage calculation worksheets online, and get comfortable enough that the setup feels automatic before your pharmacology course begins.
Microbiology Basics
Many nursing programs require microbiology as a prerequisite, but even if yours doesn’t, understanding how infections work will serve you from your first clinical rotation onward. Practicing nurses consistently rank infection control, hospital-acquired infections, disease transmission, and specimen handling as the microbiology topics most relevant to their careers.
Focus on the basics: the differences between bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. Learn what Gram staining is and why it matters (it helps identify bacterial types and guides antibiotic choices). Understand how pathogens spread, whether through direct contact, droplets, airborne particles, or contaminated surfaces. Aseptic technique, the practice of maintaining a sterile environment to prevent contamination, is a skill rooted directly in microbiology knowledge. Hospital-acquired infections remain a serious patient safety issue, and nurses are on the front line of preventing them. Knowing why you wash your hands a specific way, why you wear gloves and gowns in certain rooms, and why antibiotic resistance is a growing threat gives real meaning to protocols that might otherwise feel like rote checklists.
The Nursing Process (ADPIE)
Before you walk into your first nursing class, learn the five-step framework that guides everything nurses do. It’s called ADPIE: Assessment, Diagnosis, Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation. This isn’t just academic theory. It’s the thinking structure you’ll use on every exam, every care plan, and every clinical shift.
- Assessment is gathering information. This includes both subjective data (what the patient tells you, like “I feel dizzy”) and objective data (what you can measure, like vital signs, weight, and fluid intake).
- Diagnosis is identifying the patient’s problem based on your assessment. A nursing diagnosis focuses on the patient’s response to a health condition, not the medical condition itself.
- Planning is setting goals and deciding what interventions will help. These goals are specific to the patient and measurable.
- Implementation is carrying out the plan: administering medications, applying monitoring equipment, educating the patient, or performing treatments.
- Evaluation is reassessing after your interventions to determine whether the goals were met. If they weren’t, you cycle back through the process.
Nursing exam questions are built around this framework. Familiarizing yourself with it early means you’ll already think in the right structure when professors start presenting patient scenarios.
Entrance Exam Prep
Most nursing programs require either the TEAS or the HESI A2 exam for admission. The TEAS covers reading, math, science, and English language usage. The HESI A2 may include math, reading, vocabulary, grammar, and anatomy and physiology, with additional sections depending on the school. Check which exam your program requires and what minimum score they expect.
The science sections on both exams draw heavily from anatomy, physiology, and biology, so your study time there does double duty. The math sections test the same foundational skills you’ll need for dosage calculations: fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, and unit conversions. Reading comprehension sections assess your ability to pull key information from dense passages, which mirrors what you’ll do with textbooks and research articles throughout nursing school. Official study guides and practice tests from ATI (for TEAS) or Elsevier (for HESI) are the most reliable prep materials.
Get Your BLS Certification Early
Nearly every nursing program requires a Basic Life Support certification before you can enter clinical settings. The American Heart Association’s BLS course is the standard, and the certification is valid for two years. Getting it done before school starts is one less thing competing for your time during the semester.
The course covers CPR for adults, children, and infants, along with how to use an automated external defibrillator and how to help someone who’s choking. It’s typically completed in a single day, either fully in person or as a blended online and skills session. Make sure you take the healthcare provider version, not the basic community CPR class, as programs specifically require the BLS Provider card.
Pharmacology Patterns
You won’t be expected to know pharmacology before nursing school, but learning how drug names work gives you a real advantage. Generic drug names follow naming conventions tied to their class, which means the ending of a drug’s name often tells you what it does.
Drugs ending in “-olol” are beta-blockers, which slow the heart rate and lower blood pressure. Drugs ending in “-statin” lower cholesterol. The suffix “-pril” indicates a blood pressure medication that works on a specific enzyme system. Endings like “-mycin” and “-floxacin” signal antibiotics. “-Azole” endings appear in antifungals and acid-reducing medications. “-Oxetine” points to a class of antidepressants that affect mood-regulating brain chemicals.
You don’t need to memorize drug lists. Just recognizing these suffix patterns means that when your pharmacology professor introduces 20 new medications in a single lecture, you’ll already have a mental filing system for them.
Critical Thinking and Clinical Reasoning
Nursing school tests differently than most college courses. Instead of asking you to recall facts, exams present patient scenarios and ask you to decide what to do, what to assess first, or what’s most important right now. This requires clinical reasoning, and it’s the skill that separates students who struggle from those who thrive.
Critical thinking in nursing involves analyzing information, questioning inconsistencies, predicting what might happen next, and applying knowledge to new situations. It also requires flexibility and open-mindedness, recognizing that patients don’t always present textbook symptoms and that context changes priorities. You can start building this skill before school by reading patient case studies online and asking yourself: What data matters most here? What could go wrong? What would I do first?
Practice thinking in terms of priority. Nursing exams love questions where multiple answer choices are technically correct, but one action should come before the others. The ADPIE framework helps here: you always assess before you intervene. Airway, breathing, and circulation take priority over everything else. Getting comfortable with this kind of decision-making early will make your first exam feel far less foreign.