This paper focuses on the challenges of transition experienced by local high school graduates of the Arabic school system in the Kingdom of Bahrain, in the Middle East, as they are shaped into the person of a professional nurse through a Western model of nursing education. It investigates the elements that comprise a Bahraini student's first-year nursing experience in transnational education, and considers how this experience is navigated by the student. Drawing on best international practice, it concludes with recommendations of how to better support Bahraini nursing students' first-year experience of transnational education, which may be usefully applied to other international contexts providing transnational nursing education.