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Hey Psata, Sorry, I meant a previous BS, not BSN. (Thanks for catching that.) I then did an accelerated BSN program at Marian University, a private Catholic school with a pretty strong reputation and one of the older, more established nursing programs in the city. I had a really great time there and felt like I received a good nursing education. (The only thing I regret is having to pay private school tuition, lol.) I think what's holding me and many new nurses back is the current state of the healthcare economy in which organizations are spending conservatively, hiring less, and reshaping corporate structures. There is a big push to keep patients out of the hospitals because the costs are so high for acute illnesses; so instead the drive is toward preventative and/or low acuity care in small clinics that require a smaller staff. Just look at IU Health - it laid off 800 employees last year, and so did St. Vincent. And last I heard, IU is basically consolidating the University building with Methodist. (Don't quote me on that.) Add to this mixture that many, many (gosh, maybe 40 different) accredited nursing schools around Indiana are churning out LPNs, ASNs, and BSNs in droves. Some will graduate cohorts once a year, others more. My accelerated program (which is just one type of nursing program at Marian U) graduates about 180 new nurses a year, in three different cohorts. So every few months comes the end of another academic semester and the start of another wave of competing job applicants statewide. Again, I really think the key to success here is knowing people. This is one of the reasons why my peers who held tech jobs have been successful. They know people AND they have real experience. Heck, I've even tried applying to tech jobs to get my foot in the door, but my RN license disqualifies me.

Thanks, meanmaryjean. I've tried jobs far outside Indy. No luck so far. My limit is a ~1.5 hr drive from my home in downtown Indy. I don't think I could handle a longer commute than that. For example, I'm willing to drive to Bloomington for work, but not any farther. Any more than that, and I wouldn't have time to fully sleep between shifts.

Thank you for this tip! Financially, I have no idea how I could move out of state. But, in the long run, maybe I can't afford not to.

Hello all! Thanks for reading. Sorry if this sounds like a pathetic cry for help, because it sort of is. Here's my deal. I live in Indianapolis, IN. I'm 26, and I'm a new RN with ZERO healthcare work experience and a previous BSN in another field. It's been 6 months since graduation, and I currently have no job of any sort, and the grace period on my massive student loans is quickly coming to an end. By last count, I've applied to about 500 positions in every sector imaginable: hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, assisted living, schools, prisons, home health, non-profit, etc. I'm a non-clinical volunteer at a hospital whenever they need me, which is once a month. A friend offered me a part-time non-medical job, which I think I simply must take just to barely survive. Most of my nursing school classmates - some of them close friends - have landed jobs, which makes this hurt all the more. I'm feeling jealous, cynical, depressed, hopeless, and worst of all, regretful of my decision to become a nurse. It just no longer seems like there are many opportunities in this field. The stress of these months has raised my blood pressure to pre-hypertensive levels, I've dropped a lot of weight because I've lost my appetite (I was already a skinny guy), and I've become self-absorbed and consequently lost my long-time girlfriend. In essence, it seems that becoming an RN has been one of the worst decisions of my life and it's done terrible things to my sanity and self-esteem. Anyone been in a similar situation? How long did it take you to find work? Where are the Indy jobs? How can I gain experience if nobody is willing to interview me? Please give me a reason to venture on. Thanks. P.S. My suggestion to anyone currently in nursing school: Get a patient-care tech job now! All my school peers now have RN jobs because they worked during school OR because they had graduate degrees.

Three things to consider... 1. For those thinking about the Indianapolis program, I need to tell you, in case you haven't heard: the RN job market here truly, miserably SUCKS. I recently graduated from the Marian program, got my license, and since I have sent out applications to every single job posting I might qualify for (60+), and have been rejected by everything from hospitals to clinics to nursing homes to home health work. I've physically walked into hospitals and clinics and have been denied any sort of application. They won't even take my resume. Each day, I wake up and do an exhaustive search on every hospital website's 'career' page, everything on Indeed.com, the state's gov't site, and craigslist - and I apply to everything that's new for that day. There aren't many. I even have connections through a few working RNs, but they keep saying that there simply isn't work for someone without experience. In short, it's a sickening feeling knowing that I have YEARS of debt ahead of me, with a 6-month loan repayment grace period quickly coming to an end, and I have no way to start paying it back. Not even a penny. So, now I'm also looking for non-nursing jobs, too. I'm questioning why I chose this profession. 2. Do yourself a favor a get a job in school. Patient care tech, CNA, anything. I know it'll make things harder, but it's the smartest decision you can make. As far as I know, the dozen people in my class who had these jobs immediately became RNs on their units upon graduation. I definitely had the time to work a job, and now I'm lamenting the fact that I didn't. 3. When you do get a job it most likely won't be the nursing job you had envisioned. Nursing is a HUGE field, and people enter it for a thousand different reasons. For example, as a nurse, I never wanted to work in a nursing home or do bedside nursing. I wanted to become an OR or ICU nurse - a nurse who focuses on just a few patients at time and/or works with a team of other professionals. Now - as best as I can predict - the doors open to me as a new grad are, essentially, of the nursing home variety. Even my close friend who works as nurse in an emergency operating room (my dream unit) tells me, "Sorry dude, our unit just can't hire new nurses." So, be prepared to spend at least a year or so doing something that you weren't aiming for. But who knows? It might end up being the place you and I love.

j.pkidd - this post is for you. (Sorry, but the site won't allow me to respond to you with a private message.) Original post from j.pkidd: May 3 by j.pkidd Hello, I am very appreciative of your post pertaining to Marian University's Online Acceleration Program. I plan on perusing a BSN there and I wanted to know a few things. I am coming from NYC so I am sure the environment will be a little different for me I hope you can guide and mentor me lol. My first question is how helpful are the advisors? Regarding assignments and papers what was the highest amount of pages you ever had to do on a assignment? and what is the highest amount of question you ever had on an exam? I also wanted to know if there is any writing center close by to proofread students work or is that only available on campus? I also wanted to ask pertaining to quizzes and exams did you find the power points helpful in preparing you for the exams? I plan on living on ********, Indianapolis, What do you think about that enviroment how safe is it? Any input that you can give me would be greatly appreciate. `````` 1. The advisers can be helpful as mediators when settling questions between students and profs. (Advice: if you send a prof an urgent email with a question or constructive complaint, do yourself a favor and also send it to the advisers, otherwise you may not get a response, or a quick one.) They do a lot behind the scenes, but I never really used the advisers for anything, though they pop up from time to time in the study rooms to talk to you about things. If you "fail" an exam (get below a 76% by Marian's standards) they will contact you immediately to try and help. Other than that, I can't really answer your question because I almost never interacted with advisers. 2. Highest # of pages on an assignment? I'm guessing you mean how long were some of our care plans and essays? It varies greatly. For example, with our Leadership nursing reflections, I wrote up a single page following each clinical. Patient care plans were usually a minimum of 6 pages (not typed, just filling in boxes/short answers specific to patient, describing pathophysiology, listing every medication, making diagnoses, reflecting, etc.). You will do a lot of patient care plans. For writing classes such as Ethics, I would type 4-8 page papers usually, but I'm a long-winded writer as you can see. We had to also make 2 or 3 PowerPoint presentations, with an actual in-class presentation for one. If you're talking about # of pages to read for an exam - anywhere from zero to a couple hundred per exam. But then again, some people do fine w/o reading. 3. Highest # questions on exam? Last week I did a 3-hour long Kaplan test with 180 questions. 4. There is probably a writing center on main campus, but I don't know anything about it. By the way, I wouldn't worry about your writing skills for this program, especially since you already have a college degree. 5. Each class is different. You'll just have to see what works for you. Some classes have very good powerpoint lectures, and that's all you need (pharmacology, pathophysiology, critical care). A lot have mediocre/unnecessary lectures, where it is just easier/faster/better/more in-depth to just read the book. And a few require that you listen to the lectures AND read bits and pieces from the book. 6. The address you mentioned is just south of St. Vincent Women's Hospital, which will be a convenient place to live. That area of the northside of Indy is generally very safe and well developed. There are a lot of newish housing developments nearby as well as shopping and conveniences, restaurants, bars, schools, etc. I'm not sure what kind of nightlife it has up there, but you can always drive 15 min south to Broadripple or downtown. It will be a huge change from NYC, that's for sure! Good luck. Any more questions?

Hey Kt2nursing - Unless the curriculum has changed since early 2013, you will be required to come to the sight maybe once or twice a week during the second half of 1st semester. It will be for exams and to be taught hands-on nursing skills where you spend several hours one day learning a set of related skills, take a day off, and return the next day to be tested on those skills. You never come on weekends, so you're fine. Remember that this is not an online education. It's a hybrid education. In fact, there are no weekend meetings at all in this program unless you did what I did a couple times and sign up for weekend hospital clinicals. p.s. A weekend night-shift clinical rocks!

mhy12784 and DLuxe: thanks for these posts! They have been really helpful. It sounds like it can be an awesome job if you find the right setting and the surgeon isn't screaming.

eyeheartdani - I'm so excited for you. As long as you truly want to be a nurse, I don't think the path there (or the cost of the path) should matter. After all, you can expect steady employment and tons of opportunities that will help pay off student loans over the years. College debt is just a way of life these days anyway. Marian knows we are capable students (we all have previous degrees) and they hold us to a high standard. For instance, we can't pass a course with anything lower than a C+. If you get something lower than that on any given test, the administrators are super quick to contact you and ask if you need additional resources or tutoring. So, they look out for their students big time. This program also has a very competitive NCLEX first-pass percentage, and they are constantly aiming to improve it. I think I might be in the first or second cohort that is required to do more rigorous KAPLAN training in preparation for boards. Plus, after you graduate, the school invites you (well, actually it's mandatory) to take a 4-day NCLEX boot camp. I've heard nothing but good things about this experience. You'll have to keep everyone updated on what the Nashville site is like. What hospital are you associated with? Do you ever have to visit Indianapolis?

Hello everyone, I went to nursing school suspecting I wanted to be an OR nurse, and school confirmed the suspicion. Or, I at least now know for sure that bedside nursing is not right for me. Please, I'm about to graduate and would greatly appreciate feedback on a few lingering questions/uncertainties about the world of OR nursing. 1. I have zero health care work experience. I did not hold a patient care tech job while in school. And I know that any job is hard to come by. Every job posting wants experience. Is this requirement set in stone, or do some hospitals like to train new unadulterated grads? How did you break into the field? 2. While obviously I could not "do" OR nursing during school clinicals, except observe it happen, I did do bedside nursing on other units. Bedside nursing does not interest me and I knew it going into school. The most stressful thing to me is balancing multiple patients and their families. (In school we only had two at a time. I can't imagine what 5,6,7,or 8 patients would be like!) I'm shy and introverted, and running around interacting with so many people is a sensory overload that, I swear, seems to wear me down more than it does other people. I'm intrigued by the OR nurse's schedule of handling one patient at a time. Did anybody else have similar reasons for going into OR? What are the trade-offs? What makes OR more stressful? How are the stressors different? Do you think you've had less wear-and-tear done to your body by working in the OR? More? 3. Is OR a unique species of nursing? Meaning, will the skills learned in the OR not really translate to other specialties? Would it be hard to leave the OR for another specialty? 4. I'm drawn to the precision of OR. Is the OR more "formulaic" (for lack of a more precise word, lol) than other specialties? How true is any of this? Am I misguided? Is the OR full of surprises? 5. Can someone explain the different masters/doctorate roles of the nurse in the OR? For those of you who are at these levels, what was your path? 6. Will you talk about different specialties? Anyone do burn unit OR? Neurosurgery? Orthopedics? 7. Explain typical hours/schedules. 8. Have you ever used your OR skills to do domestic/international nurse volunteering? What about OR travel nursing? Thanks everyone in advance for their helpful replies!

I just re-read my last post and felt like I painted Marian's program in a negative light. I apologize. To be certain, this is a great program. But like any education it has its difficulties. I simply meant to paint its realities in the truest light. Whomever undertakes the Marian online education has made a great choice and in the end will be satisfied.

Hey kt2nursing, I'm a 4th-semester (4th-year?) student in the Marian online accelerated program. Finishing this May. Yay! Here are some longwinded answers to your questions that I wish I had when I was in your position: - About 70% of the online nursing and pre-req. courses (including theology) pretty much require that you teach yourself. This program takes a very self-motivated person. I happen to learn better this way, so it’s a good fit. Other people seem to really struggle. You’ll do a lot of reading. Professors do have audio powerpoints, and these vary in quality/depth. I found it easier and faster to simply teach myself from the books. As I said, 70% of the courses are this way. About 10% (including the wonderful pathophysiology) have such good professors that you’ll enjoy listening to their lectures. The final 20% are courses (leadership, community, nursing topics, informatics, professional roles, et al.) which deal with subject matter that is common sense and you’ll hardly have to do any preparatory work in order to pass the tests. A couple professors were truly awful in that they refused to educate paying students. Instead, they ignored emails or gave disparaging answers to honest questions. In 2nd semester I sent about 20 emails to a professor about a simple exam question and never got a response. That professor was recently fired. HOWEVER, most professors are at least good enough at their jobs if not outstanding. - 1st semester: usually considered the toughest because it’s science and skills heavy and it is the biggest semester credit hour-wise. More students dropped out from my cohort during this semester than any other. The first half you’ll almost never come to the testing/skills lab site at the pyramids on 86th street. The second half you’ll come a few days a week to learn basic nursing skills in preparation for your first hospital clinical (which caps the semester). I never thought I’d doubt my hand-washing and bed-making skills! - 2nd semester: super easy. I had it in the summer and it felt like a vacation. - 3rd semester: Some students felt this was actually the hardest. Indeed, it was paperwork heavy. But I really enjoyed our clinicals in labor/delivery and mental health – two specialties that deal with crazy women. I kid, I kid. - 4th semester: the busiest but probably the easiest semester. It has community health, which is hit-and-miss: some days you’ll gain a ton of experience working in low-income urban health clinics, and other days you’ll observe a home hospice nurse drive around in the country for 6 hours. Then there is leadership, which I think is a snoozer, but some people love it. You hang out with hospital managers for 72 hours, which includes sitting in on a lot of administrative meetings and watching people send emails/answer phones for hours at a time. However, leadership gives you great opportunities to network for future jobs at St. Vincent Health. There is also the critical care clinical, which places you in various ICUs for 12-hour shifts. This semester also has my favorite “extra-curricular” course: ethics. (I just find it fun thinking/writing about ethical case studies.) - Study tips: I don’t have many. I have done fine (mostly A’s, a few B’s) by just reading the assigned chapters and taking the tests. I find that over-studying always hurt me because I take the tests too seriously; meaning, I overthink simple questions. (In nursing school, the most obvious answer is usually the correct one, even if you say to yourself “there’s no way the answer is THAT simple!”) You will be taking course exams as well as Kaplan nursing exams throughout the program. Both are similar in that they will be training you how to be thinking for the NCLEX nursing boards test. I do know that students often form study groups, usually in person but sometimes online. I never did this. The newly redesigned pyramids site has ample space (couches, desks, etc.) for group activities. - Don’t be fooled by the “online” in the program’s title: you WILL BE on “campus” (the 86th street pyramids) or at the hospital or in the community at least one day of every week starting the second half of the 1st semester, if not multiple days a week. You’ll need to be on “campus” to take tests, quizzes, listen to guest speakers, have mandatory group meetings, be oriented for almost every class, learn nursing skills, and a dozen other reasons I’m forgetting. If you don’t live within two hours of Indy, this program would be torture. I started the program while living in Bloomington but eventually had to move because of the insane amount of gas and time spent commuting multiple times a week. One girl was living in Chicago! (About 3+ hours away). I don’t know if she’s still around. Sometimes you’ll go to the main Marian campus, which is an absolutely lovely place. They implemented a new teaching element at the Marian campus during my cohort which is called SIM lab. Once a semester you’ll be placed in simulated scenarios involving mock hospital rooms and state-of-the-art robotic patients (which always seem to be malfunctioning) or with paid actors (surrogate patients) who act out an illness for you. The results are usually embarrassing. They film you making an ass of yourself. Then everybody sits down and watches the film. Not exactly my cup of tea, but some people got a kick out of it. One last thing: be ready to have the official schedule change a lot and at late notice. I did this program without raising a family or holding a job, so fortunately this didn’t matter to me. But a lot of people really struggled and got ****** off with the program’s disorganization. - Dropout rate: roughly 15%. My cohort started with about 90 people and we lost about 13. People leave because nursing isn’t for them, or they get caught cheating, or they get caught misrepresenting Marian U in public (public intoxication in school scrubs), or they simply can’t do the work. Some dropout entirely. Some retake a semester. - Indianapolis: most neighborhoods north of 38th street are pretty good/safe bets, with varying degrees of affordability. South of 38th and it gets spotty depending if you’re east or west. Downtown living is expensive but very worth it. I live near downtown and love it for its culture, art, history, parks, and bar and food scene. The area around the “campus” on 86th is pretty ugly, with endless strip malls and traffic. Broad Ripple is a great community that’s near the school with cheap places available if you know where to look. - In summary: go into this program because you want a nursing degree, not because you want the world’s best nursing education. Don’t get me wrong, this IS a good education, just not the best. Yes, you’ll learn how to think and behave like a nurse, but at the same time, you’ll have a nagging feeling in the back of your mind that something’s amiss. It sometimes feels a little too hurried, a little too easy, or a little too sloppy. You’ll wonder why you’re paying SO SO SO SO MUCH money for what amounts to a mostly self-taught education. (Heck, I could have learned the same material for free at a library!) But you just have to remind yourself that you’re paying for a nursing license in the quickest way possible. A professional license in 16months – how cool is that! You’ll also have to put up with tons of schedule changes and inefficiencies and headaches. But you can think of yourself as a pioneer in this newish mode of online nurse training. In a few years, I predict this program will finally know how to run smoothly. Right now, they’re expanding their enterprise hugely (they’re about to open a branch in Nashville, TN), and they have growing pains. You can do this. You already earned at least one degree, and this one is probably going to be easier. Just accept that the program is far from perfect. And that’s okay, because who really deserves perfection!?!