How saturated is New Orleans with new grads?

[su9032]

I attend Charity School of Nursing and our school graduates about 200 students per year. How many new grads does your school graduate? I'm especially interested in LSU, Holy Cross, William Carey, Our Lady of Lake, etc. With such few positions available for new grads, it will be interesting to see how many of us will be competing for those jobs. I know people apply from all over, but this will give us a general idea of the local competition.

[BeeJayCeeYa]

su9032, that is an interesting question! Since I'm bored stupid until summer classes start, I went and got some 2010 numbers from the State Board's latest Examiner for first-time passing of the NCLEX:

227 Charity

169 LSU

40 Holy Cross

34 William Carey

5 Dillard

I think that's all of the metro area RN schools, with the exception of OLOL because I don't think they break out the NO area grads from the rest. Total numbers of successful 1st time NCLEX'ers for the entire state was 2064 last year. I've never seen a number for repeat takers.

I would be really interested in finding out the number of students who initially enrolled vs. the number who pass NCLEX for the individual schools. It seems like just over 50% for the two biggies.

[su9032]

Thanks Beejaycee,

So thats about 475 new grads for 2010. That's a lot of competition.

As far as being bored, you can always take classes towards a BSN over the summer. I'm taking statistics and chemistry. Then I will only need 28 hours for my BSN which I can start in 2012.

[BeeJayCeeYa]

Got statistics already so doing a Chem. :)

[michelle504]

Great info. to know! Even more of a reason to work harder trying to keep my G.P.A. up! :grn:

[BeeJayCeeYa]

michelle504 - this is just my opinion but while "GPA" is a good thing, "involvement" is better.

When one of the big area hospitals opened up their summer nurse intern program, one of the first questions in the interview was "what organizations do you belong to?" followed by "what leadership positions do you hold?" NO mention was made of GPA.

[su9032]

Actually they did ask about GPA on the initial phone interview and transcripts were required. However, Beejaycee made a good point about them wanting involvement especially students who are officers. All I can say is do whatever you can to get a "nurse tech/patient care tech/CNA or sitter/PCT" position to get a foot in the door. Network during your clinicals to meet the unit manager and give them your resume with a cover letter and letters of recommendation from your instructors. That helped me land a tech job and I'm confident that I will have a job when I graduate. Make friends with a nurse and see if he/she will recommend you. There is just a lot of new grad competition so networking can really help.