Because the Author believes in the importance of keeping up to date information on demographic data, socio-economical origin, curriculum, present economic situation, request for scholar development, aspiration and information about carrier expectation, that caracterize nursing students, and may furnish elements to improve programs and methods of clinical pratice, this research was performed in 1973 with the sole obejctive of obtaining these data.
It is a descriptive — type of study and the data wereco-llected through the application of a 38 — item — questionnaire applied to a hundred and fifty (150) third grade students of six (6) Nursing Schools of the State of São Paulo.
Some results are significant, such as: 48.4% of third graders are of foreign ancestry, with large predominance of Japanese; there is a relative high mobility of students within the State and a far lower witin the same community; 43.3% of students worked before entering school there is a high number of students with primary-school teaching formation and non scientific knowledge; aproximately half inscribed themselves for other courses; 57.9% of students work presently in paid jobs, most of them due to financial needs; half of students are studyng in private schools and the majority of them have to face more than 2.000 cruzeiros of yearly espenses for fees and annuity; 37.2% have aproximately 8 hours of daily working load; 62.9% have less than 10 hours of free study-time per week; 64.7% quoted real vocation as main reason for choosing Nursing, and most of them are satisfied with their choice; half of them classify Nursing as good job possibilities in professional market; 72.0% of students intend to work in Hospital rigth after graduating.
Some conclusions upon main caracteristics of Nursing students place nursing educators before a non too optimistic view. On one hand, half of the students did not have proper school education in order to face nursing school curriculum and on the other hand, an equal number of students work to support themselves.
Therefore the student profile that was obtained through this research shows emergency of correlated problems, that interfere directly on scholar efficiency. Trying to solve them within our own nursing teaching boundaries seems to be more realistic. The way to try solving them requires from nursing educators efforts in order to search for and determine more adequate teaching methods and techiniques. This task is of the utmost urgency if one has in mind the need of promoting efforts to increase students profits and as a result of it, more efficient professionals in the future.