lissa.the.cocoa

Hello all! I am currently a PhD student in public health who wants to become a nurse. I plan to begin taking the prerequisites for nursing in the fall, and begin an accelerated BSN program or BSN/MSN program 2-3 years from now. I have about half of them and just need the science courses (A&P, micro, chemistry I & II, nutrition, and lifespan development). I was wondering - how do employers perceive online CNM programs such as those at ECU, Stony Brook, Georgetown? I live in NY where there are several CNM programs in close proximity (Columbia, NYU, Stony Brook) but I'd also like the option of applying to Georgetown, since their program is a combined WHNP/CNM program. I also don't know if I'll still be in New York after I finish my BSN; my fiance and I plan to move once he finishes his own degree. Do employers respect the online programs as much as the non-online? Is it all about the board certification in the end?

Well, the goal would be to be at one of those "big, important schools." I'm doing my PhD at one now. And, I never claimed to want to go into a nursing research career to ignore students. I work with undergrads now and I love interact with students, and I have a vested interest in improving the health care workforce, especially mental health care. I suppose I was talking like an academic where the assumption is that if you say you want to have a research career, people know you are talking about research, teaching, and service as a professor. That would be the ideal for me. I'm well aware that the classes I teach won't be related to my specialty, because that's the way academia is in every field, including the one I am currently in. If I were to do this, it wouldn't be to sideline my way into a research professor career that I think is "easier than my 'own' field." Nursing would BECOME my own field. My goal would be to integrate teaching, research, and practice as a PMHNP. I would be completely willing to practice for some years and complete a nursing postdoctoral fellowship before transitioning into becoming a nursing faculty member. And I wouldn't want to stop practicing simply because I became a nursing faculty member. (This is common in my field, too - many clinical psychologists continue to practice even once they become psychology faculty.) My request for advice was more about what kinds of experiences I should seek out if I wanted to be a nursing professor.

Hi all! I am currently a fourth-year PhD student. I'm getting my PhD in sociomedical sciences (public health) with a focus in psychology. I should be finishing up next spring or summer, and I intend to enter into a research career. My next step would be to do a postdoc in health research, and then on to be a professor of public health. My research interests are in the intersections between mental health and HIV/sexual health in African American women, and one of my interests is actually around the quality and success of mental health care by mid-level providers (NPs, PAs, and LCSWs) as compared to psychiatrists. When searching for postdocs, I recently realized that many (most?) of the professors doing research that is most interesting and relevant to my interests are nursing professors! When searching for mentors at many schools the best suited ones are in nursing. Starting in my third year I have frequently thought about how useful and nice it would be to have a clinical specialty and be able to practice mental health counseling/care in addition to doing research on it. In addition, I've realized that while public health professor positions can be somewhat difficult to come along, nursing professor positions are just...out there. Even some of the top schools in nursing INVITE people to apply, which is unheard of in academia, and many positions are advertised to people with PhDs in related fields and an MSN in nursing. I've thought about getting an accelerated BSN and then doing an MSN in psychiatric-mental health nursing, with a minor in women's health. Or I could enter one of those BSN/MSN programs. My goal in doing this would be to work as a nursing professor, conducting research as a faculty member, and perhaps working as a per diem nurse doing mental health care. So I ask the nurse educators here - is this feasible? Possible? Does it make sense? What things should I consider? I'm still relatively young (I'll be 26 this year) and 3ish more years of school doesn't daunt me.

Oh well than that would surely qualify someone to write prescriptions for psychiatric medication after only 4 semesters. You do realize that actual psychiatrists only have medical school and their internship before they are qualified to write any prescriptions? Or that theoretically, an RN with any kind of experience could get her PMHNP and write a script the next day? The only "qualifications" you need to write an Rx is the appropriate license. I didn't say that she'd be perfect right out the box, and I didn't tell her not get experience first in the field. But the only way to get experience is to actually WORK. Besides, I was addressing this: That doesn't mean you will be qualified to practice competently and write scripts for a population that you haven't ever spent time observing and working with, imo which was wrong. She HAS spent time observing and working with mental health pts, she said that in her first post.

She said she was a mental health worker beforehand - she didn't say that she's never spent time observing and working with the pts. Just not as an RN.

My mom is an LPN (in the U.S.). She was a stay at home mom for 8 years. She went back to school in an ADN program when I was ~8 years old, and she didn't finish - she only had two semesters left, but she couldn't do it with an 8, 6, and 4 year old and very little help from my dad. (He's old-school, and believes that child-rearing is women's work.) So she left the program and was a SAHM again. 6-7 years later she went back to school! She finished her LPN program when I was in high school, around 16 or 17 years old. I'm 25 now, so she's been a nurse for almost 10 years, at the same hospital, in mother/baby. She's now trying to do an LPN-RN program. She's 50. She was so scared to try again, scared that she would have to drop out again or that she wouldn't be able to keep up with the work. But she worked really hard. I'm proud of my mom! It's never too late and you are never too old. You can do it! Now she DID say that it was easier to do when we were teenagers My youngest sister was 12, and we looked after each other, and I could cook dinner and clean up after ourselves when she went to her school and did her clinicals (mostly evening classes). That's how I learned to cook, taking over for my mom during nursing school, lol! We also studied and did homework all at the same time, lol. We were also older so we could give her more encouragement, too - "go mom! you can do it, you've wanted to be a nurse for years!" We really wanted her to be a nurse, as much as she wanted to be one, and she says the encouragement helped her keep going when it was hard.

This is a big reason I am going into nursing in the first place - my fiance is in the Air Force and I want the flexibility that comes with nursing, along with want to take care of people. That said, I would personally wait until you move. You can probably expect your assignment to be ~3 years, so you can find another school in the area that you are qualified for and attend that one. You may want to keep studying for the TEAS since a lot of schools require that, and the studying won't hurt.

Since you are willing to come out here, check out Yale's program and Vanderbilt's. Both have programs similar to the ETP and Yale has no pre-reqs, although they encourage you to have A&P and micro first.

Is anyone taking the prerequisites while working full time or juggling other obligations? Like I said I am in a PhD program and I estimate that all of my term-time commitments take 60-70 hours a week. I only want to take one pre-req at a time because I only have the sciences to do, and I have at least four semesters and two summers before I graduate (and don't mind waiting a year or so to finish them up). I'm trying to figure out whether I'm crazy to attempt to take Chemistry I with that much work.

I'm in a PhD program in public health and I do research on HIV and AIDS. Some of my research projects involve interviewing and other interactions with study participants who are living with HIV and I get to talking with them because I like people. I just got so frustrated sometimes, though, because they would be navigating the system and wouldn't have any advocates for them, or they wouldn't have appropriate care or there was a shortage of services. Being a PH student I've also read a lot of articles, both scientific and popular, about the national nursing shortage and especially the need for less expensive primary care than physicians can provide. I read a LOT of articles and books on health care and just seeing some of the horror stories that people go through, it made me wish I was doing something that more directly contributed to the care of others. I love research, but it's indirect at best - you kind of hope some policy-maker is going to pick up on your article a few years down the line and make a policy that's based upon it, but the entire process from idea formulation to grant writing to data collection to writing and editing of results to publishing them ITSELF can take 3-5+ years, and you still haven't made an impact except within the scientific community. I was also kind of appalled once I learned that medical school students aren't required to take a public health course, or even a basic sociology course. Some schools don't even require psychology. The things I've learned, I think are indispensable to care providers! Especially if you are working with HIV patients or others in urban or rural health centers; your directives and work with them should be influenced by what you know they have access to. So I want to parlay my knowledge of public health and my love for research into a more clinical field. I want to do direct work with patients, and make an impact on a very day-to-day scale instead of a year-by-year one. I want to be that bright spot in someone's possibly horrific interaction with the medical system, but I want it to be on the level of a nurse practitioner with that nursing philosophy of it being about care and education and outreach. I'd also love to - once I have the experience - influence policy in a hospital setting or on a governmental level and do research. But in addition - I realize that my career opportunities will expand by a LOT even if I just did an BSN, much less an MSN. It's hard to get academic jobs and even harder to get them somewhere you actually want to live. I live in the NYC area and I'd like to stay here, but trying to find an academic position in one of the most coveted cities in the country, in a field where openings can get 100-200 applications - yeah, okay, lol. BSN-educated RNs make roughly the same average starting salary as a first-year assistant professor, which is kind of sad. Nurse practitioners make more than your average assistant professor. It's not about the money for me, but when you combine having a direct impact on your patients + the exploding career opportunities for nurses (every time I look on hospital websites, there are very few or no jobs for PhD holders but 30-50+ for nurses...) + the pretty good pay even with the high COL in this area = great opportunity indeed.

I'm in a somewhat similar position to katoswife. I already finished my BA in psychology and am currently working on a PhD in public health & psychology, but I decided that I want a clinical career. I still want to do public health research and policy work, but having worked with my participants in a research setting I really want to provide direct care. I would love to go into nursing research or fill the gap for nursing educators in the future. But my position is similar to hers because my fiance is in the military, and I need something more flexible than academia with the strong possibility that we'll be moving around. So I've decided to use my last two years of this PhD program to do my prerequisites, and then go to an accelerated BSN program and then into an MSN program to be a WHNP (or a direct-entry BSN/MSN program). I've already got the social science/humanities requirements and the statistics. I'm trying to start chem I this fall, with the idea that I'll take chem II in the spring, A&P over the summer and developmental psych (despite being a PhD student - dev is not my focus) and microbiology next fall while I apply to programs (I should be finished with this PhD in May 2013, and perhaps begin the BSN accelerated program in the summer of 2013). But because it's so late in the game, not sure. I also have a lot of public health research experience via my program, but I'm also planning to volunteer at a hospital (I live down the street from one).

WHNP programs in the northeast: Yale Penn Rutgers UMDNJ Drexel Sure there are more.

My score was higher, but that's because I took the PowerPREP test at the beginning of my studying. I wanted to see where I was. If you are using non-ETS materials to study (Princeton Review, Kaplan, Barron's, etc.) I've read that they make their questions deliberately harder than the GRE. Two reasons: then you think you aren't doing as well, and you buy more prep materials or pay for a class; and two, they have a higher score guarantee with their classroom teaching, so if you score lower on the practice than your true potential, you are virtually guaranteed to score more highly on the real test. Not sure how true this is, but in my personal experience using the Kaplan book it was.

Hi guys, someone referred me to this forum. I'm just going to lurk and watch you guys - I'm planning on applying to the ETP program for summer 2013, heh. I'm currently getting my PhD in public health & psychology at Columbia. I have to take the science pre-reqs but everything else I have - so I'm just gonna lurk and watch y'all. Best of luck to the 2012ers.