(ATTN: ILLINOIANS) Illinois State Accelerated BSN program

MedOncIllinoisRN · Mar 26, 2010

i was just wondering if anyone reading this post has attended isu's accelerated bsn program or knows any specifics about the program. i have tried to contact the advisor, but so far no such luck, but if anyone does have any information. can you tell me if you enjoyed the program or if you know what the school is looing for? how competitive is the program and so forth.
and if not isu, do you have any recommendations for any other illinois nursing school, whether it be accelearted bsn or direct entry level to msn.
thanks : )

hi,

i'm not a current isu student, but i did apply to their program this year. still waiting to hear back about my acceptance. won't know until sometime between now and april 15.

the adviser listed on the absn program website is no longer there, so i would suggest calling the school of nursing and asking to speak with the current person in charge of absn advising. i'm not sure how competitive the school is. i know for the cohort that just started, they had received less applications than the previous year due to having added a cna requirement to the pre-reqs. for this application year, they apparently had more applications than normal, but i don't know how many. if i get into the program, i could probably give you a better idea on what would be a competitive app based on my on gpa and experience.

the program format now is 16 months, starting in may and ending the following august. used to be a 12 month. they announced the change in program format in early january of this year.

for illinois residents, it seems like a good program because the tuition is only about $22-24k total versus $43k at loyola and upwards of $55k for the direct-entry masters programs at depaul and rush.

while i'm not an expert about the depaul and rush programs, i think you have a generalized ms (not an msn) when you finish. if your plans are to get an msn with specialty at some point, you would still need to apply to a 2-3 year graduate school program.

uic has a direct-entry masters program too which seems good if you know what sort of msn specialty you want. some of the specialties are super competitive, so you would probably need some sort of relevant volunteer work, great gre scores and gpa to be competitive.

if you'd like more information, shoot me a private message and i'll try to help. when i hear back about the status of my application in the next 2 weeks or so, i'll be in a better position to give you information about how competitive the program is. to give you an idea of my applicaiton.. i had a 3.8 undergrad gpa, all a's in the program science pre-reqs and 1 year of volunteer experience at a hospital.