changing careers

Hi, Suzy!

I am in Arcadia. Pasadena City College is the local junior college in my area that has a nursing program. However, I go to Cypress College in Cypress and I am taking classes in Health Information Management (don't ask, it's a long story). They also have nursing, dental, radiology, and mortuary science programs. However, I've been an RN for 30 years. I did my basic RN at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California, another fine California junior college. I got my BSN from an equally fine eastern university.

There is a web site which, of course, I cannot think of at the moment that lists all the state supported junior colleges in California. You can probably find it by doing a web search for "California junior colleges". How about that for applying my college education? (My mother would be slapping her leg and laughing out loud.) Anyway, you can also get a list of all the accredited RN nursing programs from the National League for Nursing. You will want to go to an accredited program. In California you can go to any one of the state junior colleges as long as you are a state resident. So, if you can find a nursing program that you can get into faster than another one, you go for it.

Let me prepare you, though. It is difficult to get into the anatomy and physiology, microbiology and some of the other required science classes for the nursing programs at the JCs. Students with the highest number of accumulated earned credit hours get to register first and they grab up the limited number of seats in those classes very fast. Therefore, it can take awhile to get into those classes and complete them. I know that the kids at Cypress have tried to take the anatomy and physiology over at Fullerton State and ran into the same problem over there. So, everybody kind of waits their turn--like being in the line for Space Mountain at Disneyland! The smartest thing to do is to have all other courses completed before you start the clinical nursing classes. Clinical nursing classes are very time consuming and intensive. They are like nothing you've ever experienced in school before. You have just as much intelligence as anyone else. I worried about being too old when I started nursing school at age 24--isn't that a laugh?

By the way, my mother was 51 years old when she went to school at College of the Desert to become an LVN. She worked for another 17 years before finally retiring. I think that most of the ladies in our coding classes at Cypress College are probably at age 40. So, if you're inclinded toward more of a sit-down kind of job you might want to consider coding or HIM. Age has nothing to do with learning new things. You just learn in a different way is all. Now, if you have the beginning of Alzheimers. . .that's another situation (ha! ha!)

Go get 'em!