again, i can speak directly about the BSN schedule, but it sounds like the adn program has most of the same classes. so, my whole class would agree that the 1st quarter was the hardest. we had pathphysiology (hard), foundations (hard), pharmacology (in between), and pharm calculations (pretty easy). 2nd quarter, medical surgical part 1 was hard but i think that was partly because of our teacher. we had i.v. therapy which wasn't too bad. health assessment was kind of hard. right now we're taking pediatrics and obstetrics, which i think are both of medium difficulty.
as for the teachers, for the most part i like them a lot. they are very knowledgeable and VERY open to talking with you about anything. the school if new and small and i think they still have problems with some administrative issues that come back to bother us students, but you would also have a class advisor who is a faculty member. these advisors are very open to suggestion and take your suggestions to the administrators. we have gotten things changed by our suggestions, including the 1st quarter schedule for subsequent BSN students. i think this gives us a more positive impression of the school.
most of the clinicals are twelve hours. that's rough. i have a 9 hour peds clinical this quarter, the first non-12 hour. mainly they are twelve hours and mainly they run from 0630 until 1900. long, long. scary at first. but it does a lot for your confidence once you got steadied a little. our clinical groups have 4-5 students (mostly from our) class, and about half the clinical groups go once a week (for twice as many weeks), and the other half go twice a week (often two days in a row, which is really hard and i wish they wouldn't do it that way b/c you just want it to end by the second day and you don't learn as much). med-surg is the longest clinical i know of and my group five weeks in a row of 12 hour shifts on back to back days (120 clinical hours).
books will be most expensive for classes like pathophysiology, pharmacology, foundations, and medical surgical. these books are each 100-200 dollars a pop if you buy them full price. DO NOT BUT THEM FULL PRICE. you can go to amazon.com and there are individual book sellers who send you brand new books and you can save a lot. on some, like 10 bucks, but i got a new patho book for $85 that was $250 on amazon. you get to use med-surg twice though, and i still use some of those books as reference. this quarter we only spent about $120 dollars on books.
as for accreditation, we as a class are still trying to figure that our. we were just told last week that the school should be accredited in about a year, which was the most definite and encouraging answer we've gotten. there is still some question as to whether you are "grandfathered in" if the school becomes accredited after you graduate...but actually that shouldn't be an issue if you haven't started yet. so i guess the answer is...good
we have a small class and we get to know each other well and it is a very intimate environment as far as discussion and lecture goes. teachers like to be interrupted with questions in my experience. i don't know what the kids in the larger cohorts feel about this issue.
sorry that was a lot but i was trying to address everything. let me know if there's anything else.
Any DSON students here?
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