Going to Community College and Transferring

When you get your BSN and you have "RN" behind your name no one is going to ask how or where you got it. So, I would apply to all the programs you can and if you have a favorite and get in then go for it.

I'm also a high school senior and I am going straight to a four year college. My choice to do that is that I am going to a Christian college and I want to get that education (in depth of the Old Testament,etc.) as well as my nursing major. However, if I weren't a big Christian I would probably go to a community college and get my Associates and then go back and do RN-BSN. I'm still unsure if the choice I made is right being that I will have some student loans to pay off and have to meet the programs requirement. Because my SAT scores weren't the best I have to take 3 other classes which put me a year behind automatically. It sucks, but I'm thinking I can do the accelerated program they offer and graduate on time. Hopefully.

Good luck to you!

This is bits and pieces from another post I recently responded to:

I started my journey at community college to save money. I earned an associates of liberal arts degree, mostly because I had the credits so I figured oh sure give me the diploma even though it wasn't planned. I declared a mental health and human services degree at my community college after finishing my first degree, but I continued to chip away at nursing prerequisites and nursing courses that I knew would transfer to the local state university required for a BSN.

Not long after getting my associates, I transferred to the state university. Since my GPA from community college was not quite high enough to apply to nursing I declared a Health Sciences major with a minor in Holistic and Integrated Health. Here in Maine, most nursing prerequisites are bio, chem, AP I and AP II. You can knock those out of the way at a community college as long as they are going to transfer to the schools you are applying to for a BSN.

Declaring a Health Sciences major enabled me to sign up for courses that are also part of the BSN at my school like Emergency Response (Red cross CPR and first aid for the professional rescuer), Pathophysiology, Pharmacology, Microbiology, Nutrition, Health Related Research, and Concepts in Community health. In other words I completed every last course I could possibly complete with out being in the nursing program before I applied to nursing.

I'm graduating with my Bachelors in Health Sciences and minor in Holistic Health in May. I applied to 4 different nursing programs including 1 MSN-options, an accelerated BSN, a regular BSN, and an ASN. I have a 3.4 gpa at my current school and was not accepted to the first three programs I applied to, but was accepted to the ASN. I'm convinced all of the classes I have taken ahead of time for a BSN were the reason I was accepted at the ASN. My over all college goal was to earn a bachelors degree and thankfully I will have met that goal. It just so happens my BS degree is not in Nursing. Ooops! Thankfully I'm more than ok with it.

I could understand why you would apply to BSN programs, but as a back up I would apply to some ASN programs. I know it seems silly because a BSN takes you just as long as an ASN if you get prerequisites out of the way. I went through much of the same debate, and ultimately decided I just don't want to put my life on hold any longer hoping to get into a BSN. I've talked with many aspiring nursing students who also started to volunteer to boost up their resume. Many BSN programs look at stuff like that. You might also consider checking out what exams are required by different schools and sign up to take those or begin studying to take them. I've never understood why there isn't a more universal testing requirement for nursing. It seems like every school requires a different exam, and those darn things are expensive! ok, enough from me! Good luck.