Education vs Experience

your clinical/bedside experience, is the foundation of your entire nursing experience.
not academia, but clinical.
that is the reality, whether we like it or not.

definitely, knock yourself out and go for it.
i mean that.
just don't be disappointed when your advanced degree holds little value, unless you have that ubiquitous bedside experience, that every nurse should have...
degree or not.

wishing you only the very best.

leslie

I'd like to add that there are programs (such as Columbia University in New York) that offer a type of MSN where you come in with a bachelors degree in another field (non-nursing)& go straight through all of your nursing education from the beginning to the NP part & come out an NP - I personally worked with an NP from this program & she seemed very competent.

Experience is really important. Really. Like another poster said, MD's spend a ton of time in supervised practice (in residency alone!) before they are permitted to practice independently. NP programs and the like don't have near as much in the way of clinical hours to teach you things like what someone going into heart failure sounds like. Sure someone with a ton of education might be able to recite all the symptomology of CHF from memory, but have they heard the sounds the lungs/breathing make when it's starting enough times to think "uh oh, CHF"? That's not something you can learn from a book.
I see an NP all the time @ my doc's office, so I think advanced practice degree nurses are awesome, and they should be utilized more often than they are now. But I'll be honest-I wouldn't want to see an NP who had a degree but no clinical experience. The knowledge they need would not be complete, at least not in my mind.

I used to think like this when I was still a student...when I actually started working however, I realized that there is no way I would survive in an advanced program without sufficient experience @ the bedside. Many BSN programs are skimpy on the clinical instruction as it is, and I agree with others that you will have a more difficult time finding employment once school ends. I will be attending a CRNA program in Sept with just under 3 years of ICU experience, and believe me, I think that's *just* enough as a minimum to feel comfortable in this setting---I would definitely advise you to get at least a year of clinical under your belt before continuing on--it will benefit you in more ways than one!

Honestly, it amazes me that you get to be an NP after only 2 yrs of MSN. And I've been an RN for 12 years in very high acuity areas.

Medicine is not "advanced practice biology". NP is advanced practice nursing - how can your practice be "advanced" if you don't have any basic practice experience?

Honestly, without the experience I've gained in my RN years in monitoring, hemodynamics, pharm, etc etc... it would be hugely difficult to do well in my ACNP course, let alone when I graduate and am expected to practise.

Competent professional practice requires both education and hands on experience.
Most advanced nursing degree programs are designed to build on existing experience. Hands on experience can also be used to weed out those who are intellectually capable of doing the work but whose personality is ill suited to the professional role they are being educated for.

Nursing is a performing art.
I could read up all the swimming manuals, know the names of the strokes, and perform well on all the theory tests. That does not make me a strong swimmer. To do that requires taking the plunge and the willingness to gain skills.

In my area if you want to be an instructor in a university or technical school you need a MSN and 5 years recent experience.

otessa

It really pleases me to see that so many of my colleagues here on allnurses "get it."


As anyone who has ever actually BEEN a nurse knows, nursing is a practice discipline, not just an academic one. The knowledge required is both book knowledge and experiential knowledge. Practice alone does not make one an expert -- the person needs to have the theoretical knowledge as well. But theoretical knowledge alone is also not sufficient -- the person needs to learn how to apply that knowledge in actual situations.

I don't think a nurse needs several years of experience before going to graduate school -- but they do need to get sufficient experience to be competent in the clinical arena. Many nurses can handle graduate level work with only 1 or 2 years of clinical experience after their undergraduate work. Some need more. But I have never met one of the entry-level MSN grads who didn't need to do some significant "catch up" in the clinical arena before they could handle a job at the master's level. ... The "good ones" know that and get that experience before they think they are qualified for advanced level jobs.

For people in a hurry to go to graduate school, I recommend that they just take one class at a time for a few semesters -- while they work as a nurse to get the experienced need to be able to "put it all together" in the real world.

... and I say this as someone who worked for only 2 years as a staff nurse before quitting my job and becoming a full time graduate student at the age of 24. At the age of 26, I was teaching graduate school with students who had far more experience than I did. I survived, but I was forced to confront the realities of the fact that there are 2 kinds of knowledge necessary for expertise in nursing -- theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. Both are important.

As for other disciplines ... we don't need to copy their mistakes. Also, many of those have more "practice" built into their educational programs (e.g. medicine). For others, such as the social sciences, languages, etc. ... the "practice of the discipline" IS academic in nature, not clinical-type practice. The teaching of class, writing papers, doind research ... the things the grad students do as students ... ARE the things that constitute the practice of those disciplines. There is far greater congruence between the activities of the grad students and the activities of the graduates than there is in nursing.

Nurses have to actually take the knowledge they generate/teach/learn and use it to take care of sick people and/or keep them well. That clinical practice component of the discipline gives us a different and greater responsibility to be sure that those who are leading the profession are both theoretically and clinical competent.