Vinster

CMartin, a CLEP test lets you get credits for simply taking a test. Look it up. Saves a lot of time and money. You can take many of the 101's. College Level Examination Program.

Do you strike a Director of Nursing as someone likely to kill a patient or panic when someone codes? This is still blue collar work and the interviewer wants to see if you're a competent individual. Practice interviewing. Why did you choose nursing? What is your greatest fault? They actually do ask you that stuff. Can you wow them? Why should they spend $60,000 training you? Will the recruiter get heat from his manager if you don't pan out? They need to know you are a risk worth taking. You need to solve the recruiter's problem. He has a staff and budget problem. Can you be his/her solution? Some states need you more for sure and moving is one option. Otherwise: 1. Find a scary place to work: Places that need nurses and hire new grads in a region that generally doesn't often have a need are needing to hire new grads because they scare off the nurses with experience. So find a scary place like a nursing home. Just hang on, listen to the other nurses for help, make friends with them and try to absorb all you can while you're trying to get out of there. 2. Or a really mismanaged place like a correctional facility where people leave because its so crappy to work there. 3. Or a place that has nearly no risk of killing someone like a methadone clinic, where you only do one thing. Then you interview at a better place and you are more desirable because you are already employed. I got chatty with a CPR trainer who is also a recruiter. I'm working already and have gotten no leads from him but that's a good way to get a little face time with someone who can place you. Once, I walked into a satellite location of a private doctor's office, asked one of the nurses at the nursing station who in HR at the main facility do I need to see about a job. Then I went to the lead office into HR and asked for him. I got an interview, even though it was not a walk-in kind of place. The recruiter said my initiative was cool. Some places are contacting your old nursing school with job leads. Ask whoever you need to ask if you can get forwarded those leads. When you get one, go to interview the next day, before your classmates do.

Thanks. And yes that's what I meant. The BSN program wasn't available previously and the school never offered a degree, only a diploma.

No bachelors at this school yet. I have heard they will be phasing out the associates though and making it a bachelors program in the future. No NURE courses in the summer for a couple years now. They did a NURE 130 summer but it was once and not since. Getting clinical instructors to commit is weird when you don't know how many will pass the previous course and a summer course puts even more variables into the mix so I think the logistics are a little cumbersome. Btw i I just passed and passed the nclex. The last semester was brutal and awesome.

Freckles, this may be too late a response but yes it is possible. We had 210 in our entry class and 70 pass at the end. Any good program will have many people fail. A school in Staten Island had 30 entrants and only 2 pass recently. Trinitas does not interview but accepts you by academic and other criterium so may have more not pass that might have been screened out in an interview. People who post here about failing are often eating sour grapes. Some professors are pretty cold but most were very helpful. The program is very hard and it is compounded by the stress of life, family, deaths and illnesses, pregnancies, weddings and all that is going on. A nursing program will change how you think like a police academy or boot camp. You reason differently, communicate differently. Some adapt quick and pass and some can't handle that and fail. I passed in December, just passed my NCLEX and I think the program was great. I learned a lot. The last semester was really awesome. But very hard. Very very very hard. I would come into exams very well prepared and get a 78 and be amazed at how difficult the exam was. But 78 is a pass. The exams are fair and with no trick questions. All the students that got special awards for being most helpful and best grades etc. were unemployed. Either had a sugar daddy or momma or living with mom and dad or collecting unemployment. Unemployed people do better in this program for obvious reasons. Many others passed. I'm the bread winner, married, worked 30+ h per week the whole time. I got sick once in 4 years and it was during the summer break. No one in the family died, wife didn't get pregnant. It's doable. Hope you do well.

The more details you can give, the better. I'll talk to *** and see if the process has changed. Thanks for this update.

don't worry about the classes being filled in the computer system. i doubt the classes have even been opened in the computer system. no one can register except in person, by invitation and with the invitation letter in hand. sounds like you're on the right track. this letter says "you are being considered... blah blah.", right? do what the letter says. send it in asap. hopefully you will get the invitation letter. again, 1. consideration letter in oct, 2. invitation letter in dec, 3. registration in jan. just make sure you do exactly everything the letters tell you to. you'll be fine. what's your points score? do you know?

did you get an invitation letter? the process is 1. a consideration letter to which you respond, expressing your interest 2. an invitation letter on which there will be a specific date to register. i don't think the spring registration happened yet. consideration letters in october, invitation letters in early mid december, registration is early jan, if i remember right. you will register pretty close to or a little after payment for the course is due. trinitas gets it's own payment due dates to accomodate it's late registration cycle. remember, people have to pass each course in sequence before they are allowed to register for the next course, since every course is a prereq for the next course. this delays all registrations, including 130. trinitas is its own beast and the hand off from ucc to trinitas isn't well communicated until you actually get a letter. the consideration and invitation letters tell you exactly what you have to do, but you will be completely in the dark until then. this is part of why i started this thread, to clear up confusion.

****** at the Elizabeth campus would know.

There are two books. Nursing Fundamentals by Potter and Perry Edition 10 and Medical Terminology though I don't remember which edition. These were the ones I got but you may have a different edition for both so ask the book store people. If you tell the book store people you have NURE 130 they will tell you exactly which books you need. Get the full name of the book, edition and publisher. They will not tell you the ISBN because they don't want you to go buy it online. They say in a snarky way "I'm sorry, I can't tell you the ISBN." You can Google it to get the IBSN's and get the international editions. They are identical to the american editions and save big bucks. Good luck. Glad all my blah blah blah is useful to someone.

it's tough, especially with kids. parents had the toughest time of all. if you can do non-science courses in the summer and take regular session science courses you might find it easier with the kids. i would'nt do that in the summer but in a regular session you might make it. i've found it best to take one course at a time, clep everything i can and pay for it out of pocket since the low credits disqualifies me for any financial aid. because nure 131 is 8 credits, i qualify for loans now. clep-ing is way easier and less time consuming than any of the courses. you literally read the book once or twice, take the quizzes in the back three or four times and go down and kill the test. you can clep a course in your spare time (what you would normally call tv watching or decompression time) in about 2 weeks of studying. do the practice tests and look up what you don't know online or right in the test explanation. the practice quizzes are more important than the text. good luck. let me know how you do.

Also, I took ***** summer 1 microbiology (BIO 108) course. *** was the Lab prof. Don't know my grade because UCC's IT department consists of a bunch of encephalic crack babies. I have to physically go down there to ask a counselor what my grade is. *** rambles. Useless, never ending, sometimes wrong. He thinks organic agriculture is responsible for the recent E. coli outbreak in Europe. He read an article to the class that said overuse of antibiotics was the reason and then said the real reason was natural fertilizers in organic agriculture (which doesn't use antibiotics) was the real culprit. He is a staunch republican. I have no issue with republicans or democrats in general . I am pretty apolitical but it seems the hardcore on either side don't like facts, reason, history or context. **** grossly mischaracterized Al Gore's positions on climate change just to make him look bad. I thought it a little unbecoming of a scientist. I spent most of my in class time studying for the tests and not paying attention to his stories. You get good at discerning what is a story and what is useful after a while. Nothing about his family, or his septic tank or his beach trips or his history at Rutgers are on any tests. What is on the test is on his power points. Don't spend a second studying anything in the book that is not alluded to in his power points. The power points don't have much flesh on them but you can use the book to put some meat on it. Understand what is on the power points and you will pass. Many recorded his lectures but that was mostly a complete waste of time. Remember, YouTube has great videos on how tRNA works and what antigens are. This helped me get some points that I was weak on. *** is the kind of guy you would like to have a beer with and go fishing with. He's not pretentious and I'm sure is a good father and grandfather. **** was great. Great sense of humor. You do not need to buy the lab manual. He won't say it buy everything you need is provided in class. Again, stick with the power point hand outs. When you have to identify your unknown microbe, I recommend assuming your Gram-stain will be inconclusive and running all tests for both Gram-positive and Gram-negative on your microbe. Then decide what it is. This way, you'll know for sure. No need to tell him you are doing this, but if you did, he would probably commend you for being thorough and careful. Most of the people got nailed by a bad Gram-stain, and then did all the wrong tests thinking it was a different organism than it really was.

Also, Christy, about how long do you think it will take to get your MSN?

Thanks, Christy, for being so specific. I would like to encourage any other WGU students to write a more thorough description of their experience including dates and time lines, fees, counselors, books, tests and all the other things that other students are going to ask about anyway.

Remember, the UCC to Trinitas acceptance system will only give you points for courses you took at UCC.