Grand Canyon RN-BSN

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Is there any updated information? I have been in heavy contact with them and am looking at taking their RN-BSN program. I work with a GCU grad and she has nothing but positive things to say, but I want more opinions. ?

Any pro's and cons? Thankfully the only class I'm missing is stats and that is offered in the actual BSN program. I'm a bit nervous as my algebra skills are way old. If anyone took this class, do you have any advice?

Specializes in Certified Med/Surg tele, and other stuff.

I open word, and copy paste my snippets on that and add a few side notes. That's how I edit. I open word and move my culled paragraph/ sentences over and review my paper. I kept a particular word doc for my capstone from spirituality, because it had great, unused material on it.

When you get to the capstone, I think it's easier TO print everything out with a sidenote, because you reference bits and pieces and find yourself flipping between all 15+ articles.

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Specializes in Certified Med/Surg tele, and other stuff.

But just to add, I threw away a garbage sack of paper after graduation!!! So btdt..

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Prism RN

I love that old school method! I happen to use it exclusively! I'm from the typewriter era so I have not advanced very far. Do you use perrla or grammerly? I'm hoping they will be helpful. I plan to use perrla this week for my first paper. I have a Mac and cant use grammerly so I hope perrla will help me out.

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Specializes in UR/CM, Managed Care.
Prism RN

I love that old school method! I happen to use it exclusively! I'm from the typewriter era so I have not advanced very far. Do you use perrla or grammerly? I'm hoping they will be helpful. I plan to use perrla this week for my first paper. I have a Mac and cant use grammerly so I hope perrla will help me out.

LOL well I'm from the typewriter era too, so that's why I've just been doing what I've been doing and was hoping some little whippersnapper who grew up with electronics could enlighten me. You're in class 1, go ahead and get a Costco card now 'cause you'll be buying one of those reams of paper & lotsa ink! Also, since we are from that era (ahem), when said articles are printed out, the font is microscopic (well not to a normal person) and then I give myself a headache switching between my reader-glasses for the article and then taking them off to see my computer screen. If the article, in its entirety, were just on the screen, I could zoom & scoot around PRN, focusing on my highlighted parts/notes but then if I needed to access the paragraph prior, for context, I wouldn't have to go back to the paper method or try to find it on the web again.

Yes I use both Grammarly and PERRLA. Gram is only good for writing style & somewhat okay for plagiarism score (my scores never match what TII eventually says because Gram doesn't have access to the GCU database where alllll the papers exactly like mine are housed). PERRLA is just basically APA formatting and building/storing your references for a quick-click when you need to insert a citation. Don't get me wrong, I love them both, but my deal is disorganization of the supportive material before it ever gets to the paper-writing stage :confused:

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Too funny! You and I have so much in common! I am so glad I found this site. With this being an online program, I would go crazy not having people to share ideas with.

Thanks for your tips. As you may be able to tell, I am nervous for my first paper that's due next week!

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Okay all you smarties out there...:bookworm:... I'm sending out an SOS

I'm looking for a program (preferrably free) that will make all this paper-writing easier when it comes to the misc zillions of articles I run across when I'm researching for a paper. Here's my current method (dont laugh!):

Find an article, print it (seriously, stop laughing), get out my yellow highlighter, spy the pieces I want to incorporate into my paper, highlight those, hand-write my little jotted notes in the margins, and keep all those articles in a stack on the table beside me as I'm composing. When I've used something (and properly cited it of course), I draw an X through that paragraph or sidebar note so I know I never have to look at it again. By the time I'm nearing the end of my paper, all my good highlighted stuff ought to be X'd out, right? This.is.a.ridiculous.use.of.my.time. I tried to move on from the 1980's paper-version and go electronic, but that's even more confusing to me because I end up with waaay too many tabs open (dangerous on this laptop), and plus you can only right-click-highlight one blurb at a time per website/article (and the second you click away that disappears anyway), and you can't make your own notes anywhere. Then I tried to copy/paste the article itself into a blank Word doc, where you can highlight in pretty colors, and insert your own text randomly in other color/font as my "notes to self" by using the "insert comment" feature (like the instructors use when commenting on our papers in the sidebar). This also seems like a lumbering task, moving the whole article into a new format just so I can mess with it. PLEASE SOMEONE give me a program that does this:

I find an article (web, GCU library, GoogleScholar, wherever). I send it somewhere (intact). I can manipulate the text on that document (highlight, etc), and maybe there's a sidebar where I can type notes-to-self and link it over to the highlighted part. Is this too much to ask? I tried the OneNote program that came on my computer, don't like it. I tried EverNote, not what I need.

Anybody? What do you do? How do you keep all your research articles (or snippets from the e-books) organized, and the parts within the article organized (cause you're only gonna use a sentence or two from each giant article), without killing 43 trees by printing them all out? My dining room table looks like a shred bin by Sunday night.

Ideas! Please! :vlin:

(p.s., yes I know I should have figured this out before my 8th class...) :hdvwl:

I pretty much use the same method as you. I'm not computer illiterate but pretty much have the basics in my skill set. I have a Mac and nothing works like a windows program. So annoying

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A young wipper snapper would know how to save time, but I doubt I would be able to adjust to a new way!

Sounds to me like you have a system that works for you. In HS we were to write our sources, the entire quote

we wanted to use, onto index cards.... put them in order and insert into paper. :shy: At least we have printers!

We may kill a few trees, but the way you are doing this, is the only way I know of....

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Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. When you are seeking to bring big plans to fruition, it is important with whom you regularly associate. Hang out with friends who are like-minded and who are also designing purpose-filled lives. Similarly, be that kind of a friend for your friends.

— Mark Twain

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Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. When you are seeking to bring big plans to fruition, it is important with whom you regularly associate. Hang out with friends who are like-minded and who are also designing purpose-filled lives. Similarly, be that kind of a friend for your friends.

— Mark Twain

LOVE LOVE THAT. My daughter is entering her 3rd week of ADN school and already has friends hounding her because she doesn't have time to hang out because of the intensity of nursing school. She is 5 hours away from home so it's difficult enough without the added pressure. I am definitely sharing this with her!

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Specializes in UR/CM, Managed Care.
LOVE LOVE THAT. My daughter is entering her 3rd week of ADN school and already has friends hounding her because she doesn't have time to hang out because of the intensity of nursing school. She is 5 hours away from home so it's difficult enough without the added pressure. I am definitely sharing this with her!

Share this with her also... I lived alone in a tiny apartment, worked FT and went to school FT. No time for friends, I spent my off-work time sleeping, doing homework and eating PB&J, mac&cheese and delivery food. Missed countless waterskiing trips to the lake, tubing trips down the river, weekend camping trips, and on and on. BUT - it was only 2 years, and when I was done, I was working in ICU, 3d/wk, had 4d/wk off, could build my own schedule, had tons of time for family and activities, aaaaand, I was making double what my friends were making. Good investment and worth the sacrifice? Um, YEAH!

ADN school was the single smartest decision I ever made in my entire life. The second smartest was to resist temptation, give it the respect it deserved, invest in it completely, and do it the right way (ain't no "I was absent that day in school" during a code).

Haven't looked back since. Decades later, my career has served me well, I have made a difference in my life and the lives of countless patients, and I don't even know where all those friends are now...

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Specializes in UR/CM, Managed Care.

"This Week's Realization Moment", brought to you by PrismRN:

I needed some good stuff about Florence Nightingale to reference her Environmental Theory in my current paper, so I went back to my trusty PowerPoint from class 1, Professional Dynamics. I got what I needed and swiped my pre-formatted reference, but took a minute to read the ppt from start to finish. Wow. Just when I was feeling a smidge down, thinking "all I do is sit here and crank out paper after paper, I'm like a machine, the same thing over and over", it hit me. I've come a loooooooooong way since then. At the time, I'm sure I thought I was "all that" (do people say that anymore? lol), but reading my original works from class 1 and comparing to what I've written so far in this paper, in class 8, the difference is more than just noticable. Not only the level of writing and writing style, but the depth of information I can now extract, comprehend and recast into an academic paper.

Realization: Education happens, whether you notice it or not! GCU BSN Program - it's a good thing.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming (or in my case, this paper that I hated 10 minutes ago)

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It's so easy to highlight passages nowadays, in Word, if highlighting stuff is really necessary. I have been printing out stuff that I'll want to actually study in the future, like the adult physical assessment articles or whatnot.

Finishing Community/Public right now. Writing up my 1,500 word assessment of the experience. So glad to get this class out of the way! Really lucky that I got the day off, last Sunday, when the CLC powerpoint was due - I took one look at what we had, and spent two hours revising it, proofreading, spelling/grammar etc etc oh my goodness. Someone, don't know which, had left double spaces between many words, no spaces between others . . . . Wow was that tedious to fix! Ended up with a 95% on the project, which brought my average down from a 99.83% to a 97.8% for the end of wk 4, grr. Anyway, the class isn't nearly as difficult as it looks like from the syllabus.

Anyone headed in to that class, feel free to pm me or ask questions here. I'm taking a two week break before starting Stats.

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