Doing Learning Knowing Speaking: How Beginning Nursing Students Develop Their Identity as Nurses

: The purpose of this pilot study was to analyze beginning nursing students' stories to understand how students develop a sense of being a nurse while pursuing a nursing degree. The study was a secondary analysis with a nonexperimental descriptive design. The setting was a rural private liberal arts campus. The sample was a purposive sample of 10 sophomore nursing students enrolled in an introductory nursing class. One major theme was identified. Doing Learning Knowing Speaking emerged as the way students begin to develop their professional nursing identity and feel like a nurse.