Grad schools for PNP

I'm at Emory Nursing right now for undergrad. How can I say this... I hear the weather is really nice around Johns Hopkins.

Emory's nursing school is very expensive at all levels and the program does not, in my opinion, merit the cost. You get a great hospital system to play in but you enter in to a program that has a lot to work on. The nursing school really struggles to maintain good faculty. We have a handful of awesome instructors but we also have a great number of theory-obsessed types who think the coolest thing in the world is to discuss the proper model for the development of a plan for analyzing the patient's developmental level to allow for an intervention to be placed on a care plan with quality and safety taken duly into account. If that sounds like something 8 steps removed from something useful, it is because it is. Too much of our instruction is centered around the "right" way to think about things rather than having actual knowledge.

Look into Hopkins. I know that I want to head for NP after a few years of experience and the only way I'd return to Emory would be if they paid me.

That weather thing was sarcasm since I wasn't sure how heavily I would get into bashing my school. I have a distinctive enough writing style so that any one of my classmates or professors could probably identify me right away. I also know a few of them read these forums. Um, hey guys.

And yes, many of the same teachers hop between undergrad and graduate studies, although I know we've got some NP instructors I haven't met. Our faculty really isn't all bad - our PharmD is absolutely fantastic and one of the reasons I didn't bail out of the program after first semester. We have another pediatric specialist whose ADD/OCD approach to all things pediatric means one of her lectures is equivalent to nearly ten hours of regular class time. The problem is, those are the two really good main teachers we have left, and most of the other decent ones I've talked to have hinted they are headed out in the near future.

The students by and large are a pretty good bunch. Apparently the class before ours was a bunch of evil cutthroat fiends, but we're a pretty inclusive group. Depending on who you hang out with, things can range from mildly competitive to pretty laid back. Again though, I'm in undergrad, so I don't know if things take a turn for the worse in the PNP program. You can expect the usual obsession with grades, but since we massively inflate everyone's grades anyway, most of the whining is minimized.

There is also a definite focus on research. Sorry. There is a huge drive for improvement and progress and all the wonderful things that involve slinging buzzwords over a conference table until you hurl. From what I've been exposed to, it is almost entirely focused on nursing theory, teamwork theory and health care systems. You can look forward to having the words Evidence Based, Critical Thinking and Quality and Safety crammed down your throat until the winds change and we get a new set of slogans. Again, actual medical and technical details we apparently leave for other schools.

If I wanted to be an MSN or NP so that I could do research and try to change nursing as a profession, Emory might not be so bad. If I wanted to be an NP who was medically proficient, I'd go to a different school and try to get them to poach our PharmD.

Hi Congrats on all of your possibilities for grad school. I graduated from the PNP program at Emory in 2004. I did not go there for my undergraduate degree. Now, things change in a few years, but I loved my program. I felt like I was prepared clinically once I graduated. Now, I had been a pediatric nurse for 5 years prior to going back to school. I had a few classmates that were new grads and they struggled a lot more. I only had problems with the professor who taught our research class (the only B I got in school) but research is difficult for me to grasp and I don't like it (didn't in undergrad either). I agree, the PharmD who did our pharmacology class was awesome. I learned a lot. My class was small (about 10) and it was a little clicky but not too bad. They were quite competitive but I just kept my grades to myself. I would recommend the program if the same faculty is there, I am not sure if they are. If you do it full time, the PNP program is intense b/c you are doing it in 3 semesters (Fall, Spring,Summer) and most programs have you do it over 2 years and 4 semesters. I had time constraints in order to get it done so that was one of the main reasons I picked the program. I went to a very good, but very small nursing program for undergradate so my perspective might be different than someone who went to a larger undergraduate program.
Good Luck!