laneyg

I'm not positive why you get stuck in OB for so long. I have a couple of theories though. One might be that a large majority of people going into the Air Force most likely choose med/surg wanting to do some critical care and emergency care kind of thing. Another theory is that since our Active Duty members are mostly young and building families, Obstetrics is in high demand to support our airmen in building their family. I don't feel that if you get denied once you can't apply again. I have heard no such thing from my recruiter.

Congratulations superman and needsajob! That is very exciting! I haven't heard anything yet and I'm afraid this is a bad thing =( ...but I'm very excited for those of you who have been accepted!

To be brief you should focus on GPA, physical fitness, and leadership. Get involved with something where you can have a leadership position such as a student organization. The interview is like a normal job interview and you are expected to know information about the Air Force such as the core values and mission statement. During your application process there will be a write up you will complete that the interviewer will use to assess you so be genuine. You choose either OB or med/surg and if you choose OB you are basically stuck there forever except in rare cases. Hope this helps.

I have heard via my recruiter that the rumor is only 22 applicants will be selected. With 130 of us who applied this makes me very nervous! :uhoh21: However, he said this is just a RUMOR so nothing official. Regardless of this, we should find out very soon and good luck to everyone!

I haven't heard much about when we should find out. I was just told the end of April or first couple weeks of May. I'm hoping this week we will find out but I'm not sure of the status of the FY2012 budget. This will be the deciding factor they need to know before they can hire nurses.

My recruiter gave me this number. Anticipation is rough!

That is a great question! I unfortunately do not have the answer for you. I could see that you might not have to go through NTP because you do have some experience. However, it is not RN experience it is LPN experience so it's quite possible they might not let that count as experience. This is a great question to ask a recruiter!

Just heard that the boards had 130 NTP applicants which is very good because that's way down from what it normally is. This is some good news!

I had my chief nurse interview at WPAFB which I was told was one of their biggest medical centers which the exception of WHMC and a couple of others. It was not near as busy as some premier large civilian hospitals I have had the opportunity of doing clinical rotations at. This does not mean that WPAFB was not as advanced. This medical center had all of the modern technology and more than most civilian hospitals with their units and state of the art simulation labs. I will agree that a large civilian hospital may provide more opportunities and more experiences for us coming into the nursing field. However, I feel I would still enjoy more one on one time with a preceptor at an AD hospital and would benefit from learning about military life from AD nurses. This sounds like a great way to expand the program though and train more nurses.

Thanks for this Iowa!

I agree. The government budget talks right now are a little discouraging. Nursing is a critical field though. That's one good thing to think about because the military needs nurses.

The NTP boards opened today for Air Force Nurse new grad candidates and I just wanted to say good luck to everyone involved. I'm in it myself so I was just starting this thread where I can update anything that I find out about my application and everyone else can as well. Results are expected before May so hopefully by the end of the month we get to see some positive news from some of us! :)

I wouldn't say the Nurse Corps are full for any specific branch, but it's not easy to get in contact with a recruiter and get the process going. Grades I believe are required to be above a 3.0 and obviously the higher GPA the stronger your application is. The best thing to do is attempt to contact recruiters and get information from them and see what happens. Good luck :)

Is your degree a Bachelors degree? I don't believe being a home health nurse would hurt your chances or better your chances of being accepted but it's best to get information from a recruiter about that. I'm not a nurse in the Air Force (yet) either so I don't know if there are hospitals that do home health. My guess would be no and that if home health is needed it's from an outside organization. Are you only wanting to do home health or would you be willing to do medsurg/ob?

I don't know if enlisting first and then attempting to be an RN is the path you want to take to do this. The Air Force requires that you have a Bachelors of Science in Nursing to be employed as a nurse and most people obtain this degree before you actually get in contact with a recruiter. Your pathway would be: go to school, get accepted into a Bachelors of Science in Nursing program, contact an Air Force Healthcare recruiter about a year before your scheduled graduation and go from there. If you need the Air Force to pay for your schooling you can enlist first and they have certain programs for enlisted members to get a Bachelors degree but I wouldn't put all of my eggs in that basket if you want to be a nurse. You have to serve your time first before you would be considered for something like that. I can't answer many questions about that process but a search of the forums may answer that or someone else may reply with more information. Having inspections and being yelled at I wouldn't say is likely and deployment is always a possibility. There is no right answer on chances of being deployed you just need to accept that you could deploy and be willing to do that.