BradRN

I believe that certain crimes make it more difficult to become an RN. I would think the board is more concerned with those who have drug charges against them and theft. A big area of nursing that hurts many RN's is drug abuse. I graduated with a girl who was great in school, clinically intelligent but when she started working with me on a cardiac unit after school she came in "high" several times and administration took her off the floor before she started her shift one day because she couldnt even keep her head up during shift report. She was forced to go take a drug screen in the lab. She refused and quit that day. My point is she didn't have any criminal history, so this rule does not always predict which nurses will be capable of such a demanding job.

I would agree with all the posts that GPA does not mean much unless you are preparing for a graduate program. My GPA was not that great, then again when I was in nursing school my daughter was born and our family experienced three back to back deaths. I still made it to graduate school and am now working on my second masters degree. I worked for a teaching hospital and they never asked me what my GPA was, I think its because even in a teaching hospital they don't expect you to break down the drugs into their chemical components for patients, they just want to make sure you can give them the essentials on them (side effects etc.). Hope this helps.

I personally feel that when they say psych nurses are "the bottom of the barrell" they are referring to the diminished skills that we quickly lose after nursing school. Many hospitals will not even look at your resume if you havent had critical care experience in the past 5 years. I worked my butt off for years doing telemetry/CICU nursing and the pay was terrible. I've been a psych nurse for the State of Ohio for 8 months now and make more than I ever made running up and down the halls of a traditional hospital with no bathroom breaks and orders spilling out of the charts at all times of the day and night. I work no where near as hard as I did, there is a higher risk of harm where I work, but I'm willing to take that risk. I love being a psych nurse and I will never go back to tele/med-surg/ or CICU! In fact, prior to finding psych nursing I was on my way out of this profession until I found my love!

As much as I hate to admit this, it does not matter where you got your degree from but more so on two other entities; ASN or BSN, and if you have any experience in the area you are applying for? I have been trying to get out of getting a BSN FOREVER, and have come to the conclusion that if I ever want to get out of floor nursing, not that I don't like it all the time, I must get at LEAST my BSN. So I have recently started my RN-MSN bridge program as I have a bachelors in another field.