Best GTA/Ontario RPN Program?

kim1l · Nov 4, 2019

Check out Centennial College at Morningside & Ellesmere.

stonepod · Nov 4, 2019

GBC was the worst experience I've had. Please don't go here

GBC_Student, BSN, RN · Nov 5, 2019

11 hours ago, stonepod said:
GBC was the worst experience I've had. Please don't go here

I also had a negative experience. I'm sure you can hear horror stories from any pn student about their school. I didn't go to anyone else's college. I can only tell you my opinion on GBC and that opinion is extremely negative. I'd suggest Humber college. In my completely unscientific, informal survey of pn students Humber is consistently held in high regard.

Khow89 · Nov 5, 2019

I went to Seneca King and thought it was pretty decent. You can also consider Durham college, there are some go buses that goes straight to campus.

Toronto1977, BSN, LPN, RN · Dec 12, 2019

I went to Seneca Newnham (continuing education) and have no complaints about it.

NicKart · Dec 15, 2019

I see so much George Brown hate on these forums and honestly I don't understand it. I'm a GBC student right now and I've had nothing but positive experiences at the collage.

They did a big program reform a few years ago and it seems to have worked pretty well for them. I've had pretty great profs, the material has been easy to learn and applicable to the tests, and my placement was amazing learning experience and easy to get to! I'm really glad of the 5 schools I was accepted too that I picked them! It is a busy program for sure, but if you are willing to put in the time and work, it is really not that hard.

That being said, I have heard wonderful things about Humber and Mohawk as well! The only school I routinely hear negative things about is Centennial, but I've never been there so I have no real idea if what I hear is true.

If you are really not sure what school is ideal for you, see if you can talk to actual current students at each school and learn what their experiences have been. At the end of the day, you will still be a nurse no matter what school you attend. So go to the one that has the things you personally want, and worry less about what other people think you should do.

Khow89 · Dec 15, 2019

Personally, I don't think it really matter which school you end up attending unless that school is very unsafe when teaching nursing care. School teaches you like the tip of the iceberg and everything else you will learn from clinical experiences or work. In terms of employment, I think having a strong cover letter, resume, initiatives and similar past experiences will help you more in getting that interview than the name of your school. If you have a great attitude and relationship in your last consolidation placement, generally employer will want to hire you when you graduate.

Therefore, I suggest to choose the lowest commute time and cheapest.

stonepod · Dec 15, 2019

16 hours ago, NicKart said:
I see so much George Brown hate on these forums and honestly I don't understand it. I'm a GBC student right now and I've had nothing but positive experiences at the collage.
They did a big program reform a few years ago and it seems to have worked pretty well for them. I've had pretty great profs, the material has been easy to learn and applicable to the tests, and my placement was amazing learning experience and easy to get to! I'm really glad of the 5 schools I was accepted too that I picked them! It is a busy program for sure, but if you are willing to put in the time and work, it is really not that hard.
That being said, I have heard wonderful things about Humber and Mohawk as well! The only school I routinely hear negative things about is Centennial, but I've never been there so I have no real idea if what I hear is true.
If you are really not sure what school is ideal for you, see if you can talk to actual current students at each school and learn what their experiences have been. At the end of the day, you will still be a nurse no matter what school you attend. So go to the one that has the things you personally want, and worry less about what other people think you should do.

I’m happy you’ve had a positive experience with GBC thus far, but that does not mean everyone else did and wonder why all the “hate” exists. It exists simply because it was an awful school/administration for PN students.

A few things I’ve experienced over two years.

I was a January start in a PN program at GBC. Right away our profs told us that “this is the best school for nursing because we are Downtown central and we have the BEST placement options all in Central Toronto” this was later backed up by program administration.

· The majority of professors are outright rude and cannot teach. They simply show up, read word for word off a slide and call it a day.

· We had 5-10 questions on exams that were based on the material we had yet to learn/g over.

· During lecture/lab for nursing skills course we had teachers and their skills assistants constantly contradict each other in how we should be performing certain skills. They all had their own ways of doing things and pushed on us when they taught us – then when we got confused or frustrated with how or which method we should use to perform the skill during tests we were told “forget what we shoed you, just follow potter and perry. BUT YOU DIDN’T SHOW ME P&P METHOD. L

One example is, priming an IV line with meds. We were shown both methods of back-priming and gravity method – however, we were told to back prime whenever there is medication involved and will only be tested on back priming. So, we follow this method.

NOW Comes sim lab- we get a case where we have to prime an IV and add medication as a secondary line – to we go ahead and back prime while demonstrating during this simulation test. Once the simulation was done, the instructors yell, I mean shout “why would you back-prime???? You should be following P&P why are you doing it this way? Do you think you are experienced enough to perform this skill this way??” So, we are stunned at the language as a class, we all try to explain that in skills class we were taught this and showed the P&P method and that we are just doing what we were told by other professors.

But they did not care and said regardless of what a professor teaches you, you should go by P&P (I stopped making sense here because I’m getting angry just typing this up. This situation continued for a whole year, it was stressful and frustrating because we didn’t know how to perform which right method of skill to) and yes, we complained to the dean and administration several times. They were either on vacation or showed a lack of interest.

As mentioned, I was a January program start, so that meant our program went through the summer.

Come summer, we have our regular professors for the first 7 weeks and random summer hire prof for the last 7 weeks.

This caused a lot of problems with the style of teaching and how in-depth they taught. In pharmacology, one prof who was hired for 7 weeks flat out refused to allow us to review a test because she didn’t write the test and doesn’t care to go over issues with the questions. Towards the end of the semester, a lot of the seasonal hire professors gave up on teaching and just pointed out which slides will be on the test instead of actually teaching.

Then, come the test questions. A lot of the tests are recycled from previous terms – that’s FINE however they don’t go over them before handing them out. Over the two years, there were SO many typos and one question appearing more than once on a test it was a joke. One test had 3 of the same question – so the prof took them off and screwed us all by weighting each remaining question a higher grade.

On a final exam, we had cross-match questions- there were 9 of them – the prof had the answers right there on the exam. The End result? She removed all 9 questions from the exam and now we had 9 fewer questions, thus the rest weighing more (this affected a lot of our grades)!!

If an exam question was typed and made up by the professor – it was always a confusing one and poorly written. When you reviewed the test afterward and read the question out loud to them, they got confused themselves and couldn’t figure out the right answer. (majority got these questions wrong). Again, no changes were made to your final grade.

We found several instances on our tests where we chose the right answer based on potter and perry or other book materials, we were marked wrong because the professor had made that question themselves and feel that the right answer was what they had chosen, not what nursing books advise.

When it came to consolidation, the administration was so disorganized, that we all received our placements a few days prior to the start of semester. We also received a meet and greet notice with a date and time which was sent to us the NIGHT before. A lot of us had to scramble to cancel work, bring their kids with them or were just unable to show up – and then got a lot of attitude from the clinical instructor for not showing up.

we were not clear how many consolidation hours we had to complete as we were provided with several documents regarding clinical and they all had different # of hours on them, the math on how many hours per week did not add up to any of the TOTAL number of hours that were required to graduate. When we asked for clarification, we were told to stop emailing them and read the course outline and clinical handbook file for answers. We tried to explain and show proof of contradicting documents with different hours – they said its “410” as in like DUH, how could you not know that??? (this number was also not clear nor listed on our documents.)

Also, some consolidating students were told they would get something (placement) close to home. Instead, some had to travel 3 hours one-way to get to them. Majority of placements were outside the city during the summer and the answer we were given “we have to compete with other schools to keep placements” – I was told by several hospital units that they don’t accept GBC students anymore because the placement office is disorganized and not nice to work with.

This is all I remember for now. I wanted to cry out of frustration for the entire two years. We were constantly treated like we were idiots, but that was the result of poor planning and administration – they were SO disorganized and unapologetic.

I would do anything to beg every student to just not go here.

stonepod · Dec 15, 2019

Apologies for many, many grammar typos (sad face)