Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p> <bold>Aim:</bold> To explore the potential categorical distribution characteristics of academic resilience among nursing interns; and to verify the moderating effect of general self efficacy on the relationship between transition stress levels and various dimensions of academic resilience. <bold>Background:</bold> The transition from campus theoretical learning to hospital clinical internship easily induces severe transition shock among nursing interns. General self-efficacy is a vital psychological variable that may buffer the adverse impact of transition shock on nursing interns’ academic resilience, while the categorical characteristics of interns’ academic resilience and its moderating mechanism remains unclear. <bold>Design:</bold> A descriptive cross-sectional study. <bold>Methods:</bold> Nursing interns from a medical college in Jinan, Shandong Province, were selected as the study participants between August and December 2025. The survey used a demographic questionnaire, the Transition Shock Scale, the General Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Nursing Intern Academic Resilience Scale. The Mplus 8.3, IBM SPSS 26.0, R 4.2.1 and GraphPad Prism 10.1.2 were applied for figure preparation and statistical analyses. <bold>Results:</bold> A total of 441 valid questionnaires were ultimately collected. The academic resilience levels of the nursing interns could be divided into three groups: the negative group (12.2%), the moderate group (53.7%), and the positive group (34.0%). Analysis of moderating effects indicated that nursing students’general self-efficacy moderates the relationship between transition shock and moderate and positive academic resilience. <bold>Conclusions:</bold> There is heterogeneity in the levels of academic resilience among clinical nursing students. Institutional leaders can enhance their academic resilience by using tiered management to boost overall self-efficacy and reduce the impact of transitions. </p>