Advice from Last Year Nursing Student

[CrazyHands]

Hi,.

Maybe I should call this "things that I wish other people told me". Anyway, I will be done with school in Dec. I am doing an evening ASN program since I work full-time plus.

I have found that the pre-reqs that are required (Chem, A&P I &II, Micro, etc) for this program (I am not sure of the exact req for all programs, but most seem similar) are the BARE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS. If you do well enough, they will get you into the program, but by no means do they indicate if you will do well. We started with 80 students, went down to 45, by the second semester. Many people who failed who had all A & B's in the pre-reqs.

Nursing is very heavily centered around Chemistry. If you struggled through or hated chemistry, you will NOT like Nursing. Perioid. I wish I had taken MORE CHEMISTRY.

MATH - take more. You need to be very, very comfortable with math. Each semester we have a make or break medical calculations exam. So if you hate math, see above comments.

If I had to do it all over again, I'd take my time doing the pre-reqs. I rushed through them to apply, and was not finished in time to apply the first year and had to sit out an entire year before being accepted. On the bright side, I did take an extra statistics class and an intermediate algebra class for the reasons sited above. I really should have taken more chemistry, that would have been a nice boost.

Overall, as you may have heard, Nursing is probably one of the hardest programs no matter what state, what college, what program you do. I call it Nursing Bootcamp. The current role of nursing has moved away from bedside nursing to more delegation, and documentation. If you are going into nursing thinking it involves a lot direct patient care, you may not like the job options. Hospitals aren't interested in nurses who can't keep up with their documentation (or wait until the end of shift and then go into OT) throughout their shift.

That's my advice.

CrazyHands

[carolinapooh, BSN, RN]

I want to chime in on "keep your books". Most of them will be worthless if you try to sell them back anyway, and I do like having several different ways of having something explained for me - I've looked up stuff in my Micro book that I just didn't get from my Patho book, and since the Patho book is Master's level and the Micro book is intro level, it is explained SOOOOOOO much simpler. I also use my A&P book all the time. It's a different perspective. Plus, by the time you start getting into your nursing school courses, you might find there's stuff you've forgotten. How nice to have a reference you're familiar with.

So I too recommend keeping your books!

[smilesalot]

i think this is the first post that i read here that actually made me or pursuade me more that i am on the best decision of my life..that is to go back to school and take nursing....some if not most posts here are about bickering (BSN vs ADN), very discouraging posts...so thank you for starting this thread..:balloons:

[ann945n, RN]

I actually found chemistry to be the least used pre req class i took. I found maybe about 1 percent of my class was chemistry based and this was basic level stuff, all things you could have easily figured out without a chemistry class. Also math? seriously?? If you passed 6th grade math you are good to go! Not to belittle people but please, we are talking basic math skills. if you can convert pounds to kg as in one kg = 2.2 pounds you are good to go. Only A&P was of any worth to me pre req wise. Micro was a joke, never used it! you hear micro words all the time but dont need to know much more than that. just my two cents

[emtb2rn, BSN, RN, EMT-B]

Hi,.

snip...Nursing is very heavily centered around Chemistry. If you struggled through or hated chemistry, you will NOT like Nursing. Perioid. I wish I had taken MORE CHEMISTRY.

MATH - take more. You need to be very, very comfortable with math. Each semester we have a make or break medical calculations exam. So if you hate math, see above comments.

If I had to do it all over again, I'd take my time doing the pre-reqs. I rushed through them to apply, and was not finished in time to apply the first year and had to sit out an entire year before being accepted. On the bright side, I did take an extra statistics class and an intermediate algebra class for the reasons sited above. I really should have taken more chemistry, that would have been a nice boost.

With all due respect, I have to completely disagree with you on both points.

Firstly, nursing isn't centered around chem, it's centered around A&P and critical thinking.

I didn't like math or chemistry in HS and never took any math or science in college. The chemistry class I took at the same time as nursing I last semester helped me understand a bit more about how drugs work, but doesn't effect how I care for patients. In other words, I hate(d) chemistry and love nursing.

As for math, I spent 2 weeks reviewing algebra (on websites I found here) before taking the NET and did just fine. I use dimensional analysis (thanks Daytonite) for med calculations and haven't had any problems. You will have to be able to solve medical calculations, but you don't need to be a math whiz. You don't need to be comfortable with math in general, you need to be comfortable with a method for solving med calcs, be it ratio/proportion, dosage over amount or DA.

JMHO