ISingTheBodyElectric

Is this a normal / common practice? Should I be concerned if this is going on at my BSN program? I'm a second degree BSN student, and still figuring out the differences in standards and conventions between nursing education and other academic disciplines. I know that in any other field, an upper-division course being taught by someone with only a bachelor's degree, without additional major qualifications (journalism class being taught by an editor of a big-city newspaper, for example), is highly frowned upon. Is this a red flag for my nursing program?

I'm confused. Your above plan doesn't make any mention of A&P; only A&P 2 is mentioned, and according to your original plan you were going to take it this spring. Does this mean you took A&P 1 this semester and failed it, in addition to bio? If A&P 1 is the prerequisite for Nursing 1, what does failing bio have to do with anything? ps: But what I really want to know is, what is up with a school that allows you to take A&P 1 without bio as a prerequisite?? pps: Completion of A&P 1 and 2, and usually microbiology, is a pretty standard prerequisite for admission to nursing programs. It just makes sense -- how are you meant to understand how a body is malfunctioning if you don't yet know how a body is supposed to be functioning?

Here's a quick and dirty way to determine if something is a profession or not: Could a reasonably intelligent person with proficient high-school math and literacy skills be trained to do your job in 3 - 4 weeks? Not do it as well as you can -- that is not as efficiently, safely, or in as skilled a manner as you -- but could they be trained to perform the required tasks to a level where the general objectives of the work would be met? If judged this way, is nursing as defined by the generalist med-surg floor nurse a profession? No. You could train someone to pass meds, hang IVs, draw blood, change dressings, provide personal care, and conduct assessments in 3 - 4 weeks. They wouldn't do it quickly and they wouldn't do it well, and they would probably only have the faintest idea as to why they were doing any of it, but they would be able to do it. Compare that with a lawyer. Could you train someone to litigate in 3 - 4 weeks? Of course not. What about an civil engineer -- could you train someone to design a highway overpass in 3 - 4 weeks? How about a CPA -- could you train someone to draw up complex estates, or provide advice to a corporation on the best strategy for upgrading their equipment while maximizing depreciation -- in 3 - 4 weeks? Or a computer programmer -- could you, in 3 - 4 weeks, teach someone with only basic computer skills to design and create a spreadsheet program like Excel? The major difference between these professions and generalist nursing is that, unlike nursing, someone with 3 - 4 weeks of training in these fields would be essentially just as useless as someone with no training at all. It wouldn't just be a matter of them doing the work poorly, or slowly, or unsafely -- someone with only a high school education and no other training would be completely unequipped to draw up blueprints for an apartment complex after a 3 - 4 week crash course in architecture. Compare that to basic floor nursing. Ask yourself, honestly, if someone couldn't be trained in a month to complete the bare minimum tasks to get through a shift as a floor nurse. Not all the stuff that we should be doing, and pride ourselves on doing -- patient education, providing a last line of defense against medical errors -- that really do require professional education; just the basic skills and abilities without which the floor would cease to function.

Without going into too many details that might identify me -- I'm a current USM Options student, and if I had to do it over again, I would have gone somewhere else.

I am SO sick and tired of people trotting out the "dun wanna support you wif muh tax dolluhs" whenever someone mentions going on food stamps or taking another form of assistance while in nursing school. The EBT, medicaid, and daycare grant that my wife, our 2 year old daughter, and I currently receive while I'm in school full time are NOT paid for with YOUR tax dollars. They are paid for with MY tax dollars. Before I went back to school I worked 15+ years, making anywhere between 50-100k per year. My wife did the same. Paid taxes on all of that, and never once took any kind of assistance. If you do the math, that's roughly 3 million dollars in taxable income between my wife and me. Taxed at 20% federally (+ / - deductions, state income taxes, sales taxes, etc), that's about 600,000 in taxes we've paid out over our lifetimes. Once I'm done with school, barring some disaster, we'll be making 200k+ a year combined income. Given that we're in our mid 30's, we can expect to work another 30 years before retiring. So add another 1.5 million (at a minimum) in federal taxes we'll pay out before retirement. That's 2.1 million in federal taxes, total, over our lifetime. So yeah, excuse me if I don't hang my head in shame over the EBT, health care, and daycare assistance we're drawing over the next two years. We've paid more than our fair share into the pot, and I absolutely refuse to become a stranger to my wife and daughter or cut corners on my education for the sake of what some of you very mistakenly believe are YOUR tax dollars.

If you're truly concerned, email the dean of nursing and ask. I'm a male, accelerated BSN student, and the school I'm attending had no photos of men on their webpage. Not a one. They also have no men among their full time faculty. And that bothered me. Enough to email the dean and ask about it directly. She wrote back and expressed dismay that I might have considered not applying because the website didn't show any men. She said she honestly hadn't thought of it before, but that looking at it, she realized that it would indeed be very off-putting. She went on to explain that they had actively tried to recruit men onto their faculty, but hadn't been successful. And she assured me that men made up a sizable chunk of their cohorts. She also offered to put me in touch with male graduates of the program to ask about their experiences. This is not to equate the experience of being a man in America with being black in America. Just to note that this might be an honest blind-spot for this school, as it was in my case.

You need to know the basics of human anatomy and physiology, and also the basics of chem before taking a micro class. If you can honestly say you got that from highschool and whatever college biology & chem prereqs you've already taken, then you should be fine taking micro first. On the other hand, if you're clueless on the basics of genetics, the organelles of a eukaryotic cell, osmosis and diffusion, cellular respiration, and the major organs of the human body, then you're going to struggle, and you should take A&P first. It is much more difficult to understand what the pathogens are doing to the human body when you don't have a clue about the human body to begin with.

Out of curiosity, I googled asn to msn bridge and up popped Frontier school of nursing, which is a private non-profit. It looks like they have you take 12 months of classes before the MSN/NP portion starts, but a BSN is not awarded. The entire program is 3 years full time, or 4 years part time. Which is probably about as long as it would take to do a BSN-bridge, and then an NP. So direct asn to msn bridges do exist, at least in name. But it looks like you'll be taking just about the same amount of time to get through school as if you just did a BSN to MSN.

Update: She dropped out after two weeks. Said she felt overwhelmed, and like she was expected to know a whole lot of things that she didn't. Said she was never warned that it would be like that. So I guess that answers my question .. though I would still be interested to hear from anyone who went this route and made it work.

Interesting. But looking at the Yale GEPN course of study, and as you mentioned, I see that in first semester includes fundamentals of anatomy, nutrition, and something called biomedical foundations of health and disease that looks like it covers physiology before venturing into pathophysiology. So it appears that the Yale students are at least getting a crash course in the basics. By comparison, my wife's friend is expected to sit through a pathophysiology lecture and absorb the details of right ventricular heart failure without first knowing the four chambers of the heart. I would love to hear that someone has successfully done this, or knows someone who has.

Has anyone successfully gone through one of these, or know someone who has? Or have any horror stories to share? I just found out that one of my wife's good friends is in the first semester of a direct-entry NP program with NO prerequisites other than a prior bachelor's degree. No anatomy, no physiology, no micro, no chem, no nothin'! These classes are also not taught in her program -- students proceed directly to pathophysiology, nursing care, pharmacology, etc. I had no idea such a program existed, and frankly, the idea makes me a little woozy. I am also in a direct-entry NP program, but everywhere I applied to required 5 units each of anatomy, physiology, and micro, along with stats, nutrition, and a minimum of a semester of chem. Plus various psychology, sociology, anthropology, lifespan development, death and dying, etc social sciences. All in all I took 40+ units of prereqs before applying to the direct entry program I'm currently in, and I still feel a little overwhelmed sometimes by the accelerated pace. Anyway, I kind of can't imagine my wife's friend is going to do anything but crash and burn. She has 23 units this summer, including pathology and pharmacology. I asked her how it was going, and through our conversation I learned some things: she doesn't know the right ventricle from the left atrium. She doesn't know that the kidney does anything but "filter the blood." She thinks there are vaccines against bacterial infections. She thinks the stomach is where most if not all of digestion and absorption occurs, and that the intestines are just kind of a tube for poop to poop go through before leaving the body. This is an intelligent (but not genius-smart) woman with absolutely zero background in the sciences. She has worked for the last 20 years as a social worker, and wants to be an NP now. I guess I'm just wondering if anyone has gone through, or has known of someone who went through a program like this? Where you went in with practically zero knowledge and were able to get up to speed / fill in the gaps as you went along? I want to be supportive of my wife's friend, but I'm also considering gently suggesting that she withdraw from this program, take some prerequisites, and reapply.

A critical incident? For wearing a ball cap to lecture? Did it have something obscene or racist or sexist or etc written on it? What lesson did your classmate learn from this? That small minds focus on small things?

I saw the title and thought I would find someone whining about failing classes with less than an 80%, being dropped from the program after two failed classes, having to write papers in APA format, etc. I have a special, angry place in my heart for lazy nursing students who don't take their education seriously, who try to skate by on the minimum required, with no consideration of the fact that they'll be making life and death decisions after graduations, and that C+ nursing care kills people. But man alive that is some serious bull&^$% you had to deal with, and if it really is like you tell, then you have every right to feel robbed. Please know that this is not normal, and that those instructors and the environment they created are not representative of what nursing education can and should be. If you aren't completely soured on being a nurse, take some time to look around and find a quality program. Make certain to talk to current and former students. It really doesn't have to be like that ..

This is my 2nd degree, and it's a graduate degree, so I have a whole different set of federal loans to choose from compared to you. But I would almost always recommend federal loans over private, especially in undergrad. Especially if you can qualify for subsidized loans. The interest rates are sometimes a little bit higher, but while the government WILL come knocking if you default on your loan, there are very generous deferment options available for federal borrowers. If you can't afford your private loan because you lose your job, there's very little option to negotiate a lower payment plan. To be honest, I've never met someone who took out private loans and was happy with their choice. Nursing loans I don't know much about, since my school doesn't offer much of them (only about $500 per student per semester worth) so I never really bothered checking them out. As for scholarships: I'm normally pretty skeptical of the time and effort required to apply for scholarships requiring an essay or a whole lot of other hoops to jump through, given how small many of the awards are, and how many other students are competing. Scholarships are taxable, something I don't think a lot of people consider, and once taxes are taken out you might have been better off just working the hours that you spent writing an essay, gathering letters of recommendation, etc. At least work is certain to pay something, whereas scholarships can suck up a lot of time and effort and result in nothing. I am not a gamblin' man. BUUUUUUT .. given how good your GPA is, and with this being your first degree, I think you should give it a shot! I wish I could point out a specific place to start, but check your school's financial aid office and/or website. Also, there are sometimes very unique scholarships out there tailored to students in very specific circumstances (scholarships for a student with a parent who worked in the coal mining industry, for example. Or to get even more specific, there's a very generous scholarship at my school for a female student of nursing who is from a certain county who demonstrates a desire to return to that county and work as a public health or school nurse). One last piece of advice .. try asking nursing students a year or two ahead of you if they know of a particularly helpful financial aid officer at your school. All financial aid officers are NOT created equally. Don't give up if you meet with one who isn't helpful, or is even actively UNhelpful -- it's been my experience that some financial aid officers are on a power trip, or are nice but clueless, and you sometimes have to hunt around for someone who is both nice and also knows what they're doing.

Thank you for posting that, but I should have been more specific. By asking if the studies controlled for ADNs with prior degrees in other fields, I was wondering if the studies, or subsequent analysis of the studies, took into consideration the possibility that ADNs with prior degrees in other fields (journalism -- why not?) might provide the same (or even better!) outcomes as BSNs. I was wondering if maybe by lumping the relatively small number of ADNs with a prior degree in with the "normal" ADNs, the study was confusing the benefits of a bachelor's degree (ANY bachelor's degree) with the benefits of a BSN specifically. That is, maybe it turns out that the average nurse with a bachelor's degree (ANY bachelor's degree -- underwater basket-weaving, even) is a bit less likely to kill patients than the average nurse with only an ADN. And furthermore, maybe this difference in patient outcomes has everything to do with the factors and attributes that your average* person with a bachelor's degree is more likely to possess than your average* person with only an associates degree: higher IQ, less likely to suffer from mental illness (depression, PTSD), less likely to be physically disabled, higher socioeconomic background, less likely to have English as a second language, less likely to be a minority and suffer the inherent stress of racial discrimination, more likely to be male and therefore have more time to focus on work rather than split attention between work and family responsibilities, less likely to abuse substances and less likely to relapse after quitting, etc. All factors that would positively influence patient outcomes but would have absolutely nothing to do with having taken a handful of nursing theory and research classes. So, yes, I am suggesting that having a degree in an unrelated field could very well make a difference in the level of nursing practice. *please note that I say "average," here. I am NOT arguing that nobody with a bachelors has a low IQ, is hooked on drugs, or in an abusive relationship. Or that everyone without a bachelors is suffering from mental illness, or comes from a broken home, or etc. Please please please don't confuse my pointing out relatively small statistical differences over population groups as being specifically insulting to any actual person.