Rockit

At Miriam you get hired onto a specific unit and you are assigned a nurse preceptor that works with you. This is your orientation and it can last up to six months if you are in a critical care area.

Hi I am just finishing an internship at Miriam. It was a great experience. You are assigned a precepting nurse. Normally, it is a reciprocal arrangement. The precepting nurse does teaching and you in turn help out with physical care, etc. Miriam only requires sixteen hours a month to maintain status as a Collegiate Nurse Intern but you are only allowed to work 16 hours a week max. You are designated to a unit but you also have the opportunity to float around the hospital and try different areas: ER, CCU, ICU, Hem-Onc, ortho, etc. They also have a specific internship available in the OR. On the other hand, Rhode Island Hospital's Student Nurse Associate (SNA) does require 40 hours per month and you can work up to 40 hours per week. My understanding is that there is no formal teaching and that you pretty much work as a CNA. RIH stresses that they look at their student nurse associates first when considering applicants for their New Grad Critical Care Internship Program. Miriam does not have such a program and getting hired into their critical care areas as a new grad is becoming very difficult. My advice is that if you have your heart set on critical care to go to RIH for your internship. I also know people who have done a semester internship at Miriam and then switched to RIH (you are not allowed to do both at the same time). Good luck!!

Hello. In 2005 I made a decision to go back to school for nursing at the age of 47. Even though I felt a calling to it, it still wasn't easy to decide whether to go for it. The schooling is a years-long committment. In the end, it is kind of a leap of faith. Nursing is a job with great responsibility. That's one of the reasons nursing school is challenging. You can limit the stress in nursing school by keeping up with the work and really immersing yourself in the subject matter. It's not something you can easily do "on the side". Nursing is a professional job and there's no ceiling on the knowledge or growth.

I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and have been doing art seriously for 15 years. Couldn't believe the number of fellow nursing students I met with previously established careers and advanced degrees.

I'm sweating through two four-credit lab Chem courses this summer, which the nursing dept. at my school recently decided to make a prerequisite for application to the BSN program. A lack of ability to do Chemistry weeds people out of a program that has more applicants than it can accomodate.

I just finished the first semester of Chem. My strategy: get tutoring for the math, plan to spend major amounts of time doing every single assigned problem...don't skip over anything, and make every attempt to embrace the subject matter: if you fight against it with a bad or self-defeatist attitude you will sabotage yourself. Good luck!!!