The way it’s always seemed to work for me is that the knowledge I accrue forms the foundation that I can draw from when faced with practical applications. Those practical applications tie things together in a way that makes so much more sense than they do in a purely speculative, academic setting. For instance, a physical process makes more sense when you know what is taking place in the body. It makes even more sense when you throw a medication into the mix and you can you see what it does to modify a process in real time. It makes even more sense when you decide on a medication, and then see the effect of it. So it might not be that you immediately retain all the minutiae that you go over in school, but without it, you certainly don’t have any hope of having it available to pop into your head when you are in a practical application. Plenty of things need to be sitting right there in the front of your mind, but other things can safely reside in the background ready to be conjured up. Hopefully, you can gain an understanding of how all those topics intersect to form a whole picture of human functioning. They really feed into each other, even some disparate topics such as psychology and physical functions. You may even see a few concepts reinforced a few times as well, while some are merely covered once. My goal was always not to study to know everything, but just to study to know most things.
So I think maybe that PA might have been misconstrued when you heard what he or she said. Right now, you have no idea what you will specialize in, and you certainly don’t know what knowledge you need to know in other realms that overlap. For instance, as a psychiatric Np, folks like me still need a lot of broad knowledge about other topics of health so that we don’t screw things up with our actions. You look at labs and comirbidities, imaging, therapies, surgeries, other medications... all those issues, and more, impact what goes on. I need to know a lot about them to almost the same extent as the folks that work in those specialties. The difference is that my days would be spent focusing on psyche vs folks in the other specialties who take it to the next step and perform their trade every day.
To a large extant, you should be more relaxed knowing that you don’t have to know everything, but not so much that you ease back on your studies. Just relax enough to not let the pressure affect you adversely. I’m of the opinion that simply studying anything in a given night is better than studying nothing, and sometimes I had to plow through and study more rather than be overwhelmed to the point where I just went to the store or watched TV. If you have 4 chapters to cover in a night, you are better off reading 2 of them than reading none.
