As a frequent visitor of allnurses.com, I always found myself checking out what grades, gre, experience got people into anesthesia school. I was recently accepted and thought I would share my stats for those of you who are new nurses.
I am a relatively new nurse. Graduated in May 2008. Will have 1 year and four months of experience before school starts in August. I work lots of hours, probably 70 or 80 a week because I enjoy the overtime pay. 3.66 BSN GPA, 4.0 in the sciences with a B in statistics, 1200 on the GRE. I also took and passed the CCRN after I had accumulated 1800 hours on the floor. I worked in a SICU right out of school for 5 months that did mostly cardiovascular procedures CABG, AAA and a variety of other surgical cases. For the past three months I have been working in a TBICU/trauma/burn intensive care unit handling a variety of trauma and burn patients. No day is ever the same. The hospital is a Level I trauma center. I am older than most students as I will be 40 when I start the program. My first college degree was obtained in 1990. I partied as a frat boy more than I studied and ended up with 2.48 GPA with a degree in marketing. That was almost 20 years ago and I believe the admissions board looked past that stat. I spent the majority of my post BSBA degree working in the pharmaceutical industry doing sales, product management and brand management.
Bottom line.....if you are a new nurse and you want to be a CRNA...go apply. You may get in just like I did. Don't let anybody tell you that you need 2 to 5 years experience before you apply. If you do....you'll just be waiting longer to get into school. I applied to 6 CRNA programs and was invited to all of them to interview. I completed 3 interviews last week and received my first acceptance letter today. I'm sure more will follow.
My recomendation letters came from 2 of my nursing professors, one from a practicing nurse midwife, one from a practicing CRNA and two from my peers in the ICU. I never submitted a letter from my supervisor as he wouldn't write a letter for me until I had spent 2 years on the unit. Screw him! :) Follow your dreams and go for it. I am living mine out.
