Background: In today's society, nursing has become the focus of more and more people. The effect of clinical practice of nursing students directly affects the future clinical work. Therefore, the feelings of nursing students directly determine the quality of future work of nurses.

Aim: The aim of the literature review was to describe the nursing students’ experience in hospital practice,

Methods: The author conducted a descriptive literature review. Articles were searched in Pubmed and search terms “students nursing”, ”professional practice” and “experience” combinations AND and OR were used.  Finally, 6 articles with qualitative approach and published in 10 years were included.

Results: All findings were synthesized and assigned to 3 findings based upon their similarity in relevance. The three synthesized findings were: “negative experience”, “positive experience”,“expectation”.

Conclusions: This review systematically illustrated the experience of nursing students during clinical practice, suggested teaching hospitals should pay attention to needs and feelings of nursing students during clinical practice from selecting clinical instructors and optimizing the teaching mode to help to trait the ability of communication of nursing students, which was helpful for finishing the role transition smoothly.

Keywords: clinical practice; experiences; feelings; nursing students