Streamline2010

If you're free to relocate, look at western PA and NE OH. Seems there are still plenty of LPN jobs in LTC but not many in hospitals nowadays. When I looked at LPN as a career change back in 2009, I was told LPNs are usually team leaders in nursing homes. Avg salary in Mercer and Lawrence counties (they are more rural) was quoted as $15 but Beaver and Allegheny were $18 - $21 or so. Avg PA statewide LPN annual gross salary was quoted as $40,000 and RN as $63,000 for 2008, per state government publications. Homes are affordable. There are several diploma RN schools, and associate degree RN college programs at community colleges and Penn State branches. Penn State branches offer bridge to BS RN. Clarion University, I believe, offers an online bridge program. (Sorry if this is a thread hijack. Just wanted to offer the suggestion to the ones who don't want to retire or leave LPN work.)

Congratulations on finding your niche. You and I could trade places, haha. I'm looking at medical laboratory, and biomed equipment repair and later, sales, because I just want to work and not have to do nursing all day. I can relate to your first academic failure, because I am a natural at things like physics and chemistry and technology, but I failed to like nursing or motherhood very much at all. (I never had children and am quite happy staying away from marriage and child-rearing, lol.) I do think that nursing is another universe, compared to science and technology, and that a person who has very strong affinity for the one kind of thinking will not be content in that other universe. Best wishes in your future endeavors! :-)

Unless you can study while you commute, commuting time just wastes time that could otherwise be used for studying. This is especially true if you are in an accelerated BSRN or a dipolma school program, where you have no spare time or days off.

Why can't you flunk them? Do they all keep getting passing grades in sprite of your best attempts, or what? >;D Nursing, as a profession, created its own problems for itself by fixating on some very rigid and antiquated concepts of what type of person "belongs" in nursing. I am a woman, I endured almost one full year of RN school, and although I began with great pride and great enthusiasm, I was completely disgusted and bored by it after about 9-10 months. I found the instructors and the administration to be boring, one-dimensional, holyrollers who, when you get right down to it, had lived a very, very constrained life of church, children, marriage, and nursing. I wanted to hit the ground running, have a very intense, efficient, and no-BS curriculum of how to do the job of Nurse. Vocational. Technical. Efficient. What I got was almost a year of lecture-blather that was a total waste of time (Honey, ahh cay-un read mah OWN textbooks, Bless Yor Haaart, Dear) so please stop with the boring hours of drone, and turn us loose to go home and study, thanks, 'k, 'Bye. And a meandering curriculum that was so chopped-up and nonsensical that all I can think, is the school wanted to pad and stretch out 15 months worth of training to 24 months, so as to get more billable hours. Oh, and they did flunk out a lot of students along the way. Nursing I got all the single moms who had to do their own parenting plus go to school and maybe work a job, too, as well as the usual party dolls who spent all of their break time on Facebook, and a few hapless men who, well, being men, just kind of wanted to know exactly when all of this blather was ev-ah going to cut to the chase, and said so. Nursing II got a lot of the average-intellect students who just were always kind of confused about what they were supposed to be learning (I was confused, too, but I memorize stuff well), and also cleared most over-age-45 students, and all the remaining guys except 4, and the people who really had to work to be able to pay for school. Oh, and most of the tatoo'd people, too. The class got a lot more homogenous and youthful and white and female and tatto-less after Nursing II. Nurs III, well, I didn't finish that due to "conducts" that consisted of one late care plan concept map, one missed clinical that the school had changed the date for and never notified me, and one conduct for my telling them exactly what I thought of the whole mess, including their exams that full 75% - 80% of the class could not pass. I think the people who say that nursing education needs to vastly increase the diversity of instructors, and also teach more practical skills are exactly right. I'm not sorry that I'm out of it. It's nice to go back to normal people and not be burdened by such an adversarial faculty and administration, anymore. I am a baby boomer, the very youngest edge of it, and nursing school bored me to the max. Women who have worked in nursing their whole lives seem to have tunnel vision. I know that I read in one of my books in Nursing I read that "nurses tend to socialize only with other nurses," "and nurses go home burned out and stressed out at the end of the day," etc. I read that in a textbook!, in my required reading, and the first thing I thought is: Well, I don't want that job.

My school is really hepped up on us being able to do math without a calculator. We had to pass a math test in semester 1, and we have another one in semester 2. That said, the material has been: addition subtraction multiplication division (review those multiplication tables, b/c the 6s through 9s you probably haven't used in a while, hehe) solve an equation for an unknown set up ratios and proportions and then solve for an unknown fractions: add, subtract, multiply, divide units conversions; English to SI and the reverse, given the factors they want us to use (NO CALCULATOR) There are formatting requirements for numbers that have decimal points in them: We use 0.2 ml, not .2 ml, for example. And there are other rules for the formatting of numbers in med calcs, to help prevent reading numbers wrong and thus prevent math errors. Your drug calc book will have all of that in the early chapters, most likely. You could look at a GED Math review book, too. That's what I used for the pre-entrance exams, a GED math book. It had been years since I'd had to do pencil and paper calculations. That's what calculators are for, lol.

True, that. In nursing, you need to learn it all and carry it around in your head. The material from fundamentals or growth & development or whatever doesn't go away.

1st choice: Alone. 2nd choice if forced to: Roommate who is another nursing student. Nobody in a standard degree, because they don't have to work as hard and have free time for fun.

That's the reality of it. All the hard stuff is in there. Diploma RN, associate degree RN, and BSN: All sit for the exact same NCLEX-RN. Most people nowadays do not finish an associate degree RN program in the standard 24 months. The more I see of nursing school, the more incredulous I am that the RN associate degree is actually 4x the amount of work and skill that most other associate degrees are, and it's still called an associate degree. It needs to be in a class by itself. Most other associate degree programs do not include summers and do not require nearly as much study time outside of class. The old hospital RN programs, even before they required so much college work, used to all be 3 years.

aside from not being accredited and possibly not having competent instructors, i don't see where you got anything much different from the typical nursing school experience everywhere. nursing is more of a time-hog than the typical associate degree or 2-3 year technical training program, by far.

Which courses? The nursing should transfer unless there's some accredation issue, or you are taking then from a for-profit like ITT and are tyring to transfer those to a college. For gen-ed, tell your associate degree adviser that you want to substitute the baccalaureate degree courses for the associate level ones so that you'll have a 2-year degree that will transfer. They might go along with that.

I'd probably start the associate degree, try to pick up any classes I could take that apply to the BS RN program, apply to the BS RN program(s) (always do more than one), and then jump ship if I got accepted to the the BS. That way, should a BS program not accept you, you are still working toward that RN while you're applying to BS programs. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, in other words. Credits taken toward the AS, if chosen wisely, also work toward the BS. I'd not sit it out, if I really wanted RN, and had that AS program ready to go and hadn't been accepted by a BS yet. I'd start AS and transfer to BS. Lots of people accept at one or more schools, then decide at the last split second which one to proceed with.

What everyone already said, plus remember that hospitals and insurance companies are also not keeping people in hospitals as long as they used to. The goal is discharge them to someplace: LTC, rehab, home, whatever. But get them out of the hospital. That also reduces the number of nurses employed by hospitals, perhaps permanently, many believe.

My final was earlier in May, and exactly the same horse manure that the OP describes happened. (Where is the thread topic icon "steaming pile of horse manure?") I actually believe that test was comprised of every test bank question that instructors had rejected for exams I through IV, because the question's topic was so obscure or so trivial that it didn't make the cut. The A students got no better than 89% on the final. Many C students were suddenly flunked out because of the final. B students dropped to C. It was a "hard" test only because its content was material that had been ignored or glossed over for the entire semester, only to appear on the final. Several students fought instructors on a couple of questions that we, as older adults, knew the "correct" answer could not ever happen in today's hospitals for any number of legal and hospital policy reasons, and they certainly taught us those things in class. And still they would not give us credit for choosing the second-best answer, based on their own TEACHINGS! :mad: I really felt bad for the students who really worked had all semester, only to be tossed out of the program by that witch of a final exam. eta: I agree that the culture of "don't help 'em" is the wrong customer-focus approach for nursing schools to take. I have passing grades, but I am less than impressed with the biatchy women's club that seems to dish out more punishment than teaching. This, combined with the lack of nursing jobs and the (let's face it) loss of the lucrative signing bonuses and the uptick in short-staffing and the push to convert RN from full time to part-time positions makes me want to tell all y'all nursing school admins to go find some other sucker / fool who'll grovel through your program and kiss posterior. I just take it one semester at a time, always looking for that better ship to jump to. (Yes, I did bring my potty mouth along from my other career. hahahahaha!)

https://allnurses.com/general-nursing-student/nursing-school-must-458460.html That thread might have some pointers, too. (I went back through my bookmarked & subscribed threads)

their pass rate is only 39%?? nationally, it's more like 60%, i believe. i think you could probably do an 8 week a&p if you are willing to study all the time and are good at memorization. i didn't find ii any more difficult or tedious than i. i took mine in regular fall & spring sequence, and could probably have coped with an 8-week session for ii if i had to. not having kids and not having to work (assuming you get unemployment enough to get by) really is a huge advantage for ns students. the teas test should not be that difficult. the english and math should be straight out of ged english or math books. i used a ged math review book, as a matter of fact, since i took algebra in hs a long time ago. the worst part about the math for me was i just was not a speed demon at addition, multiplication, and long division anymore without a calculator. we had to do it all w/ pencil and paper and i was in the 85% range b/c of rusty brain, lol. i didn't take teas for rn, but did take the hesi and nln pax tests and i was in the mid-90s on them without too much study effort. i used a free download of mcgraw hill preentrance exam guide (found the link on this boaqrd w/ the search feature here, the hesi study guide that i bought (good book), an online teays review site that i found w/ google (don't buy their package, not worth a dime), cliff's notes general biology and general chemistry books, my microbiology college class helped in a lot of questions, and the english and reading comprehension i think you either have or don't by this point in life.