Streamline2010

Congratulations! Keep up the hard work, LOL. I have a friend who is now a M.D. When he got to the end of his rope and went crying to his counselor that he was so exhausted and didn't even have time to sleep, she snapped: "Well, what do you want to do more? Become a doctor? Or sleep? Which one is more important to you?!" He said that advice helped him to deal with the realities of the situation. LOL Just stay focused on your longterm goal and don't dwell on the unpleasant aspects of school.

I was 52 when I started, with 2 college degrees and a 20-year career behind me. I elected to drop out of RN school because nursing wasn't for me. The one and ONLY "physical demand" that gave me any problem was all of the sitting. Sitting through 6 hours of lectures and the chair made my bum numb and my back sore. If you wear the right shoes for you, walking around won't be an issue. Nurses DO get to sit down every so often. Stomping concrete in say, a factory or a big box retail store is far, far harder on one's body. If you have always worked jobs that didn't wear out your body, and you don't have preexisting back, shoulder, or other injures or physical limitations, then starting RN school in your 50s or even 60s should not be a problem. People vary, and one person could be physically older at 40 than another is a 80. Keeping your body weight down is a very good idea, too. Hoofing it around with 30-50 extra pounds is harder than doing it at ideal body weight. Some of my classmates were diabetics and they had a more difficult time with the demands of clinicals. I'd be cleaning up patient bathrooms if I had lags in the day. I am just compulsive motion. LOL The forced sedentary lifestlye of sit and study all the time got on my nerves. Infuriated me, truly. I am not a "sitter." I've always had jobs that let me get up and move around. RN school started to give me frozen shoulder and other annoyances that I know were just from the forced inactivity. I think that's a huge part of why I quit. After a day in class, I'd be practically bouncing off the walls and I preferred to go clean house or anything except sit and study, because I had so much pent-up energy. RN school just didn't work for me. But that's okay.

Nursing classes will always refer back to the various theories of development, over and over. Practically every clinical assessment and care plan I did in N II and N III asked me to determine what stage of development in Erikson's, Freud's, Piaget's, what stage of Maslow's Hierarchy. You use these growth and development theories to help plan patient care. A nurse always has to be able to justify actions by pointing to a source that says "you do this." You can't just make up something because you thought it was a good idea, in other words. You have to cite a basis for your decisions.

If you get in there and work, work, work, you should do fine! :-) Nursing I is kind of a catch-all course. The "kitchen sink." LOL It's a hogepodge of seemingly unrelated topics, but it's valuable introductory things that you need to know before you can move on. Just get on the subject material, stay up with it, don't ever let yourself get behind. The nursing content isn't something you can cram. You have to drill yourself, over and over, so that it sinks in. And the test questions will be asking you how to apply it, and make decisions. Prereqs were just facts and knowledge. Nursing will require you to know the material, but many of the exam questions are going one or more steps beyond and are asking you to do NCLEX style questions, where you may have one completely wrong answer, and two or three that are possible actions but you have to prioritize them and pick the BEST one. Personally, I think Nursing I is a bit early for that but hey, that's how nursing school is and you have to hit the ground running. The key is to thoroughly understand the course material, and do a lot of practice questions before the real exam. That's what those Success books do. And study guides for your textbook, and online resources for your text, too. Nursing school takes over your entire life. If the material comes easy to you, you may be one of the lucky ones who can read it once and sail through with a minimum of effort. But that isn't the norm for a lot of people. Don't worry about the clinicals. If your clinicals are like ours were, it's mostly nurse-aide level skills: Bathing, repositioning, ambulating, making beds with or without a patient in them, helping people dress. You learn to use the BP cuff, thermometer, take pluses at various locations on the body and they start you with that in the sim labs. You get training in lecture about the legal, ethical, and HIPA issues that a RN has to know. We started by going to a nursing home. We changed bedding, gave bed baths, dressed pts, ambulated them, observed medications being administered. We examined charts. We followed CNAs and LPNs around. Our instructor made sure that we cleaned up incontinent pts and changed briefs, performed a tube feeding, observed an ostomy appliance changed. They expose you to the odors, the vomit, the poop, etc. But you also get to take BP and other vital signs, chat with pts, assess their needs (like "risk for social isolation" for a bedridden pt, etc) Don't go in nervous. You can handle all of it. That's why it is called Nursing I. There are people who fail nursing I. But of the ones I saw it was one or all of 4 things: -- People who didn't put the time in : crammed, tried to catch up, could not because you need to understand thoroughly not just parrot something back. Scored too low on exams. -- People who just had no idea what they were getting into, found they didn't like the work and it was too far outside of their interests. I knew a couple of men and women like that. Some withdrew, some failed out. -- People who had too much going on outside of nursing school. They could pull that off in prereq college courses, but not the nursing course b/c the nursing demands so much more time outside of class. You may need to cut back hours you work, give up your social life, and/or shift childrearing onto the spouse. -- People who just lacked maturity. They didn't ever study, they goofed off, cut class, performed unsafely at clinicals, complained about odors and poop, slacked off at clinicals, maybe lied about performing patient assessments and just made stuff up. Instructors want to boot those people out ASAP. One thing to remember about RN school: Always be on your best behavior. THINK before you act. Always be adult, control your emotions, actually do the work, be very dedicated to learning, and don't be "above" anything. The instructors are observing you. The regular employees are observing you. The patients are observing you. RN school is a lot about ethics, character, and emotional maturity. It's a very demanding curriculum. It's a "people" profession, and those all require you to hone your people skills. If you get in there and work, work, work, you should do fine!

Nursing process is a roadmap for determining patient's needs and then planning, administering care, then evaluating whether or not it achieved the goal. As a nurse, you can't just do something because you thing it's a good idea. You have to be able to prove or show that whatever you do is not just something you made up on a whim. First, you assess. Then "The nursing diagnosis is the nurse's clinical judgment about the client's response to actual or potential health conditions or needs." The diagnosis reflects not only the medical condition but also the other complications (actual) or potential (risk for). The nursing diagnosis is the basis for the nurse's care plan. The nurse can't use the doctor's medical diagnosis diagnosis of FUO (Fever of Unknown Origin). The nursing diagnoses have to be things that a nurse can do something about, is what my instructor said. So, use the assessment of the patient, and out of that pull your three + three + three nursing diagnoses. You have some clues: for example, I know that early 40s to 50s is when many men get into cardiovascular problems. So, here's a guy age 42 w/ sedentary lifestyle, 5'10" and 220# is probably overweight, you see some information about his diet, and "His father died at the age of 50 from a heart attack" which is a huge risk factor. You might pull a risk-for or an "educational diagnosis" (whatever that is, LOL) out of there. Safety-related issues are always important. etc. Analyze the clues they gave you, and eventually you are expected to prioritize but at this stage might just have to identify needs of patient and convert that to nursing diagnoses.

I had the opposite experience: Started nursing school thrilled, excited, deadly serious about succeeding, willing to do it day and night or whatever it takes, striving for perfection. And determined to thoroughly learn everything because I knew I'd need to use it later. I didn't expect it to be difficult, because I had top grades in my non-RN preqs and my other two degrees and my preentrance exams, I'd completed non-nursing associate degree and a business degree and had already had a career. I was burned out on nursing school within 9 months, and I didn't finish a full year. Honestly, I think that how you feel about A&P and how easy or hard or fun or tedious or interesting or dull you found A&P is perhaps the best indicator of how RN school's first year will strike you. In spite of what the instructors say, there *is* a great amount of memorization to be done in nursing. But it doesn't stop there. You must memorize it, retain it, understand it, and be able to apply it. Nursing school content was 180 degrees from the science and manufacturing and technology work that I enjoy, and I didn't like all of the sitting in lectures all day only to have to sit all night and study. By the time I left, I was totally burned out from the grind. I thought I'd try a different school but the farther away I got, the less I cared. How well-structured and well-organized the school's program is matters, too. Proper planning on their part, and arranging the content so that it makes it easier not harder for students to learn really helps. The school I was at didn't teach the typical block curriculum and the usual units like college degree programs have. It was a hospital based program, and the topics and the clinicals were simply scheduled around the availability of hospital facilities and what the school wanted to accomplish that particular term. The clinicals were rotations, not even in sync with what was being taught in the lecture. Your clinical for the term might happen before or after the material was covered in class. That made twice the work for us students. If you are in a school where they kind of chop up the units into bits & pieces and sequence them randomly, or the clinicals are handled like a totally different program, expect that you must get right on it and keep on it, because you will have to work 2x as hard in a program like that. There's no way to catch up if you get behind in those "integrated" programs like that, because those programs keep students consistently fully loaded with work, required to be on the hospital premises every day with little time off, and essentially overbooked all the time.

I've talked to a lot of older adults who are back in school. This "team building" stuff is the current educational fad in many degrees now. The older students say that generally the division of work winds up unfair, with the more studious and mature students carrying some loafers. The nursing school I attended didn't do any substantial team projects until the last couple of terms. By that time, they'd flunked out 2/3 of the class, so I guess there were no loafers remaining. lol

I think that the associate degree program at Butler, PA community college sends students from Butler to Kittanning (20-25 miles one way) and Franklin (50 miles one way), PA, and some other places. Associate degree schools have been getting short shrift from hospitals that are no longer hiring anything except BSRN grads. Some associate degree programs actually closed because they couldn't get clinical sites to take their students anymore.

How does it bring maturity: Come back and answer that after you've worked 10 years or more and have paid off loans, and have changed and upgraded your skills to stay current in your field, and/or have lost an entire career field to outsourcing or offshoring and now have to retrain and remarket yourself. To suggest that older employees have learned NOTHING about how to be a productive employee is insulting. The fact that a person has a 10 0r 20 or 30 year work history gives a potential employer a good insight into the work habits as well as the character of that person. You are fixated on this idea that people only work for a single employer all of their career. That hasn't been true for at least 30 years now! "Job hopper" is a relative thing. If an engineer, to use your example, wants to bid their salary up, they typically work about 5 years for the first employer, and then they change companies and locations, for a higher salary. Sometimes they left because they stayed 10 years with the first employer, and the pay raises and promotions there just lagged so far behind the market that all of the 10-year employees of a given company might quit en masse and go find themselves better jobs because the market rate for 10 yrs exp was 1.5x what their current employer paid. Another fact that you might not be aware of is that contract employers often pay engineers higher wages than fulltime positions do, so many engineers work contract work and thus "job hop" because that's the nature of contract work, kind of analogous to travel nurse jobs. Do you consider travel nurse jobs as job hopping, a negative thing? Manufacturing has also been a boom/bust, boom a little, go bust again kind of thing, particularly in the old Rust Belt region. This recession that began in 2008-2009 caused many manufacturing facilities to close, of to shift their production overseas or to Mexico. It's only recently that healthcare and hospital workers are getting a taste of that, what the engineers and CAD designers and maintenance people and assembly line workers have been seeing since the late '70s or early '80s. In my rural area, hospitals are all closing their OB and labor/delivery units. They are consolidating services at one location. UPMC is buying up hospitals and has even closed some completely! Nursing is not going to be the secure lala land of happy ladies anymore. You have the beancounters running you, and the hospitals losing money. "Affordable Healthcare" isn't going to be a money-maker. It will mean bigger losses. One thing that employers have to face is that they no longer offer lifetime job security and a paternalistic boost and hefty pay raises to their loyal longterm employees, so they have to get used to the fact that today's employees are mercenaries and free agents who can and will leave for better opportunities, sometimes giving not notice other than "Notice that I am not showing up for work here anymore, Boss." ;-D And they brought it upon themselves, too. 100% What an engineer brings to nursing: High skill level in calculations. Pharma calcs are a breeze, as are English/SI units conversions. IV pumps and tubing choices and settings won't be any challenge, either. Neither will an manual IV drip setup. Might fully understand how to build, adjust, calibrate, and set that IV pump, LOL. Permits, rules, laws, regulations, roles and responsibilities and the why of those: No problem. Contrary to what you may think, an engineer will have a far easier time learning and understanding and applying the principles of nursing and A&P and microbiology than a nurse would have trying to go back to school and get an engineering degree. One of the largest problems I had with nursing is that the longer I was in nursing school, the more it just seemed like motherhood or a servile job. When one works in engineering, one does not work with stupid and indigent people all day. One works with very brainy people almost exclusively. During an entire year of nursing school, I never once had even one patient who was the intellectual level of engineers. That was a real drawback to nursing as a career change, to me: Just not meeting any interesting and intellectually stimulating patients in this line of work. I felt cut off from my world, and I didn't like yours except for the OR. So, I quit. One less older career changer to compete with you, hahahahaha!

In the business world, a long-range plan is 5 years nowadays. Presuming that any one person will reside 40 years in the same region, let alone work 40 years for a single employer, is sheer foolishness. People move, they quit to raise families, they get injured on the job or off the job and sometimes are on temporary or permanent disability, they leave to follow a relocating spouse, they voluntarily leave to pursue more education or a better career opportunity. Or they get fed up with nursing altogether and leave it.

Microbiology was required for every associate degree and diploma nursing program that I looked at. (Pennsylvania still has diploma schools, and they require just as much if not more college than associate degree RN.) Statistics will be a bonus on your transcript. Take it. It's something that you can possibly use on the job, and a class that employers like to see. Chem II, I don't know why that would be needed because most BS RN degrees that I'm familiar with only require one semester of chemistry. Some even have a special chemistry for nurses course. Many associate degrees that I looked into would accept high school chem and general biology, and only required microbiology and A&P I and II as college courses.

Nursing schools can have different admissions and prerequisite requirements. The math you need is really not full college algebra, but the college or university might require college algebra. Some have a special nursing math class and that makes more sense to me because you really only use select parts of algebra and also use "dimensional analysis", also known as "factor label method" to do drug calcs. Google factor label method. The math is really all covered by a GED math review book. I'd look into getting one of those. That's what I used because I took algebra in high school and calculus in college and hadn't done pencil and paper math since the 1980s, lol.

The schools that I applied to: One had a rule that if you got 80 or better on their preadmission test and you wanted in, you're in. First come, first served, no points ranking. They filled the class up and then waitlisted the extra students. If there were seats open at the start of classes, they went down the waitlist to try to fill them. One ranked applicants in three tiers: Immediate Yes, Immediate No, or Waitlist. Then they point-ranked the waitlist and tried to fill up the class, then if they didn't fill every seat or they had last minute dropouts, they opened the remainder up to everyone who met their minimum qualifications. Others ranked students competitively by points, and then went down the ranks to fill the class. They waitlisted some students and tried to fill cancellations with them. eta: Those were diploma and associate degree programs but all nursing schools and departments probably do some variant of those three.

How will they handle a student who took, say, A&P I, then took it again, but those credits are all over 5 years old now? There has to be a third time to get fresh credits, if they are standing by their 5-year rule. People enter and leave schools and the workforce for various reasons. It's soon going to get to the point where all students are "nontraditional," due to lack of funding for fulltime school, and/or career changes and job losses.

Most hospitals have a plan to have all nurses be BSRN by some date and have given current employees a deadline by which they must get the BSRN. Some have officially stated that they quit hiring diploma and associate degree. Magnet hospital or Affordable Healthcare both stipulate or strongly encourage hospitals to have all BSRN. Of course with the nursing shortage abated and hospitals actually closing units or entire hospitals and laying off nurses, putting a BSRN stumbling block in front of everyone slows the flood of new grads, too. The advantages to AD RN are that for dislocated workers who get retraining $, that usually only covers 24 mos / 2 year degree at best, so they can use their retraining money to pay for AD RN or diploma RN or LPN and then bridge later. If they can get a job w/ the ADRN or RN diploma, then they can be working, getting experience, getting paid, and probably also getting employer to pay the tuition for the bridge program as well. Rural or less desirable areas or aged areas like PA, particularly those towns that lack colleges, might find it hard to get BS RNs and they may be still hiring new grad diploma or AD RNs.

It depends on the school and how old the credits are. Some schools say "within the past 5 years" and some accept older credits than that.

There must be a female personality that is a natural fit for nursing, and I definitely am not it. Are you SERIOUS, that your husband can't handle the household carpwork and the kid for more than 2 nights??! MAKE him do it, or let the household fall apart and he can just deal with a houseful of slop and chaos until he decides to do something about it himself. Why do nurses and mommies have to be such servants and martyrs. MAKE other people do their jobs, and draw a clear boundary line for where yours stops. And don't cross it. Let the other people sink or swim.

They absolutely should feel overworked and underpaid. Nursing in my local has a $22/hr starting pay but it's about a $33/hr responsibility even for a new-grad. I quit nursing school, and one of the reasons, aside from the fact that I find motherhood insulting and repulsive, is that the culture of nursing always expects you to do things gratis and kill yourself for your patients and your job. It takes altruism too far, imo. Honestly, women who work in manufacturing and finance and tech and engineering are not treated like stupid mules the way that nurses are. Nurses need to stop letting patients and administrators heap ever more work on them. I worked in business and manufacturing and engineering before I tried nursing. Nurses are fools to let themselves be worked like rented mules. Learn how to say No. Learn how to say "That is an unreasonable amount of work to expect me to get done in one shift, and I am going home now. Here's what didn't get done. See ya tomorrow." MAKE them staff correctly, by refusing to do the extraordinary every day. Do you think that the beancounters respect you for being too accommodating and servile. No, they don't. If you do more, they will just see that you can be exploited to do more and more, and when they ruin your back and your health, they will just bring in some young and foolish new grad and push you aside.

Dimensional is also called Factor Label Method. I used it in engineering. Having all of the units cross out at the end so that you are left with just the correct units (mg, mm, lb, kg, volume per minute, whatever you wanted) is a nice check that you set up the equation correctly and have solved it correctly.

^ That's what it was in NW Pennsylvania in 2001, the last year I looked, and actually it was more on the $8.50 side so US$9.00 might be where it is now. I have heard that CNAs in the Washington, PA hospital make $15/hour, but that's the highest that I have heard of in western PA. LPN starting pay was only $15/hour here. And it didn't go up much with experience, either.

It's probably going to be different for a college degree LPN program than for a vo-tech school type program. Most LPN programs here are 11-12 months full time days. Requirements for the typical vo-tech adult ed LPN program here: Be a high school grad or get your GED by the time you start the LPN school. Submit the application, pay the fee, get your HS transcript sent to the LPN school. Take the Work Keys or TABE or whatever test that school uses and get an acceptable score. Meet with the school's director of nursing or whomever does the personal interview. Have a criminal background check & a drug test. Get your immunizations and CPR card. Pass your nursing classes with a 80% or better.

Since you are undecided about whether or not to stick with LPN and your online biz isn't established and proven, keep your money and continue to drive the old car. Cash in the bank is power. There are lots of placed to rent, and there is always a car out there. My sweet spot for "new" vehicles is one that came off of a 2 or 3 year lease, because the thing has depreciated to almost half of it's sticker but is still new enough. Seriously, losing HALF to depreciation is like flushing money down the drain. If you know you have the money in the bank, you can quit nursing later if that's what you decide to do. re. the stress: Stress is what you do to yourself. Give it up. Go see a counselor and learn how to talk yourself down before you burn out. Taking care of patients is always "vague." That, at root, is what I didn't like about it. Computers and engineering and science are my thing, not nursing. Plus, as a female, everyone kind of expected me to be maternal and fuss over them and baby them. I decided med lab work was a better fit.

Schools only use certain classes to point-rank students competitively . If the F is in a class that isn't used for that ranking, they will see it but it shouldn't count. If it's a class that's part of the point ranking, then I think most schools would average the A and the F. Not all RN programs count the same classes fo ranking, so you can also shop the schools for ones that would look at your more favorably than some others might. Yes, that 5-year freshness date should mean it's tossed out. Should. lol. One thing you learn about nursing programs and instructors is that they make their own rules and seemingly change them at will.

Read the school's RN admission requirements. The college catalog tell you classes are used as admission requirements. Generally you have to take specific classes incl. A&P I and II and maybe microbiology and the schools can all vary a bit, so go read. And you take a preadmission test, too. Which one depends the school. Again, that will be spelled out in Admissions Requirements. Mostly, it takes 1 year or more to get the prereqs done, then 24 mos. for Associate degree. So, 3 years, which is what the old diploma school RN programs were (3 years.) That assessment test might be something all students must take, a placement test to see what level of math, science, English, etc. you are at. RN programs have their own preadmission test (HESI, TEAS, NLN PAX, & maybe there are others.)

If almost done with the psych degree, you probably should finish it. Some of it will transfer to RN programs. Look at the prerequisites for the various RN schools and you will see it varies with the school. Most want A&P I and II, microbiology, some kind of math, maybe sociology. There are accelerated 2nd degree RN programs but they are demanding and also expensive. On the other hand, having completed one BA/BS degree might curtail your financial aid for getting another undergrad degree in nursing. Discuss that with the school's financial aid staff. 3 paths to RN: diploma school (equivalent to an associate degree nowadays and has just as much non-nursing college coursework, but the hospital teaches the RN part.) associate degree BS RN Many hospitals are limiting new-grad hiring to BS RN only. And also giving their current diploma RN and associate degree RNs some deadline by which they must complete a BS RN. Take classes at community college: In most cases those credits transfer. Most RN programs have a "cheat sheet" of exactly which course numbers they accept from all of the area colleges, universities, and community colleges.