By the second stage of an RN-to-BSN foundations course, the writing usually turns inward: who are you as a nurse, what do you believe nursing is, and can you argue that belief instead of announcing it. This is the natural home of the professional identity or personal philosophy piece, where your values meet the profession's published ones on paper. Your section may print this as NR 300A or NR300A; it is the same course. Chamberlain publishes no syllabi outside Canvas. The placement here is our teaching judgment from the course's catalog arc; your section's rubric decides what your week actually asks.
Understand what an identity paper is really scoring
A nurse in a busy family practice spends her day translating: a provider's plan into words a worried father can act on, a teenager's half-answers into a picture of what is actually going on at home. Ask her what nursing is and she will show you rather than tell you. An identity paper asks her to do the harder thing, which is to tell you in defensible sentences. That is the real assignment underneath the friendly prompt: convert instinct into claims, and claims into supported ones.
The trap built into this territory is sentiment. Faculty read stacks of papers declaring that nursing is caring, that patients deserve compassion, that the writer treats every patient like family. None of those sentences can be wrong, which is exactly why none of them can score well; a claim that cannot be disagreed with is not doing analytic work. The identity pieces that earn their points define terms, take small positions, and anchor personal values to published professional ones so the reader can see where the writer stands relative to the profession's own documents.
Expect the deliverable to be a short paper rather than only a post at this depth, often your first full APA-formatted submission of the program. That means the writing row of the rubric widens: title page conventions, citation format, reference list mechanics. Whatever your section assigns, treat the formatting as a graded skill being introduced on purpose, because every later course assumes you picked it up here.
Build the identity paper, step by step
Six moves that turn beliefs into an argued piece of writing.
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Mine the rubric for the required ingredients
Identity prompts usually enumerate parts: a definition, personal values, a view of patients or of the profession, sometimes a nod to theory. List the parts as headings first so nothing required gets lost inside your prose.
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Define nursing in your own words, then test the definition
Write your one-sentence definition, then hold it against a shift you actually worked. If your definition would not cover the hour you spent coaching a first-time mother through nebulizer treatments, the definition is too narrow, and noticing that is analysis worth putting on the page.
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Choose two or three values, not seven
Every value you name owes the reader a scene and a consequence. Two values each carried by a concrete, de-identified practice moment will outscore a recited list every time, because the scene is what proves the value is yours rather than borrowed.
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Anchor your beliefs to a published professional document
Set your personal view beside language from a named, dated professional standard or code, and say where they align. This is the move that converts a diary entry into a foundations paper, and it is usually worth its own paragraph.
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Show one place your philosophy is tested
An honest paragraph about strain, the value of patience meeting a waiting room of behind-schedule pediatric appointments, reads as maturity. Identity papers that admit no friction read as brochures, and graders know the difference.
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Close on trajectory, not summary
End with what this philosophy commits you to during the BSN and after it, in checkable language. A closing that merely restates the introduction spends its words twice and earns them once.
Lay out the paper and its word budget
Our frame for a professional identity piece, sized for roughly 750 to 1,000 words, a common span for early RN-to-BSN papers. It is our own outline rather than anything the university issues, and your week's rubric outranks it wherever they disagree.
| Section | What belongs in it | Word target |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction with a position | Your definition of nursing stated as a claim in the first paragraph, plus a one-line map of the paper. | 90 to 120 |
| Where the definition came from | The practice history that produced it, compressed to one or two de-identified scenes rather than a career tour. | 140 to 180 |
| Core values, evidenced | Two or three values, each with a moment that shows it operating and what it cost or achieved. | 200 to 260 |
| Alignment with the profession | Your view set against a named, dated professional code or standard, with agreement and any honest tension noted. | 150 to 200 |
| Where it strains | One situation that tests your philosophy and what you do when it does. | 100 to 140 |
| Commitment forward | What this identity obliges you to do across the BSN, in verifiable terms. | 70 to 100 |
Support a personal paper without hollowing it out
Cite the profession when you speak for the profession. Sentences about what nursing values, what nurses owe patients, or what the discipline holds true are claims about published documents, and the documents should be named and dated in the sentence. Your personal sections can stand on experience; your professional ones cannot.
Use scenes as exhibits, and de-identify them ruthlessly. "A grandmother raising a medically complex preschooler taught me what advocacy costs" carries evidence weight precisely because it is specific and unattributable at once. Strip names, dates, and any detail a coworker could recognize, then keep the scene; do not solve the privacy problem by deleting the life from the paper.
Introduce APA mechanics like the graded skill they are. First full paper means first full reference list. Match every in-text citation to an entry and every entry to a citation, format the title page the way your section's template shows, and accept that this pass is slow once so it can be automatic later.
Keep theory, if required, in your own voice. Some sections ask you to connect your philosophy to a nursing theorist. If yours does, paraphrase the theory in plain words and show the connection in one honest sentence rather than quoting a definition you would not use unprompted. A grader can tell a borrowed sentence from an owned one.
Avoid the five mistakes of this week's territory
- The unfalsifiable philosophy. "Nursing is caring for the whole person" cannot be disagreed with and therefore cannot be argued. Add a position: what that commits you to, and what it rules out.
- Seven values, zero scenes. A list of virtues with no practice moments attached reads as an application essay, not analysis.
- No professional document anywhere. An identity paper in a foundations course is partly a test of whether you can put your voice beside the profession's official one. Skipping the comparison forfeits the point of the assignment.
- Autobiography instead of argument. The reader needs your history only where it explains a belief. Two jobs examined beat a full resume narrated.
- First-paper formatting losses. Points quietly leave through the title page, the reference hanging indent and the citation-reference mismatch, all preventable with one slow formatting pass.
Run this list before you submit
- Your definition of nursing appears as a claim in the first paragraph
- Every named value has a de-identified scene and a consequence attached
- A professional code or standard is named with its year inside a sentence
- One paragraph admits where the philosophy strains and what you do then
- Every in-text citation matches a reference entry and vice versa
- The close commits you to something checkable, not a restatement
Writing your identity paper for NR-300A?
Send the prompt and the rubric out of Canvas. A premium original draft comes back in 24 to 48 hours with your philosophy argued rather than announced, and revisions run until the grade lands.