Any Info. about USN

Hi Femflores1 & everyone,
I am currently a student at USN. I started in August 2007 and will be graduating in March 2009. I am happy with my education at USN. I was also accepted to NSC’s BSN program, but when I went to USN for my interview I was so impressed with the campus technology and staff. The professors are so knowledgeable and go to great lengths to make sure we learn the material. We are the only nursing program in the world that has a block curriculum. For example, we spend a month in the classroom learning the material for Maternal Newborn and afterwards we spend a month in the hospital for clinicals. I think this is a great because we are more prepared by the time we deal with actual patients. We also have a great laboratory with SIM dummies that are great to work on. Another thing about our clinical rotations is that we do three 12-hour shifts a week which will better prepare us for when we are RNs working in the hospital. Our instructors are with us for the whole 12 hour shift and never leave the floor without us. Every assignment and exam we take has to be passed with a 90%. If we don’t score a 90% the first time, we are given one more chance to remediate by taking a 2nd exam (different questions) after we review the material. I personally have not had to remediate, but others have told me that the professors spend a lot of time with the students to help them prepare for the exams. They even meet up with the students on the weekend, etc. The technology at the school is great. Every student has a laptop to follow along with the powerpoint lectures. Our classroom is arranged in a huge hexagon with a jumbo screen for each side. We are all connected to wireless internet and they just implemented new software so that when the professor asks us a question during lecture, we all key in our responses and the results show up on a bar graph. It makes class fun. Since it is only an 18 month BSN program, there is a ton of material to cover in a short period of time. You must be a self-motivated student in order to survive the program. I am a total procrastinator but learned early on that I needed to change my study habits. People do fail out of the program. We started with I think 92 students and are now down to 76. However, if you keep up with the material, there is no reason for you to fail. The nursing school is only about 3 years old, but we have already been granted full accreditation by the NLN. We had our site inspection a few months ago and the reps from the NLN were very impressed. I am excited because this means that I can continue on to pursue my masters after I graduate. I hope this information helps. Sorry it is so long but I wanted to give you as much info as possible so that you can get a better picture of what USN is like. Best of luck to you and anyone else pursuing an education here.

I'm not at USN but did get to the point of interview with them last year and I have to agree with Pogi. Basically, you get what you pay for. Ultimately I decided on NSC's 12 month accelerated program for two big issues; money (its less than 1/3 of what USN costs) and time (12 months). I have alot of preexisting student loan debt and needed to be able to get back to work quickly so NSC was the right choice for me. I do love most of our instructors and even though the program can be kinda disorganzed and stressful at times I think I made the right choice for me. Good luck with your application to USN!

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