Prospective student wondering about GCSU travel for clinicals

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Hi!

I am in the process of applying to GCSU for their fall 2015 cohort. However, I have heard that there can be up to 100+ miles of travel for their clinicals. I was wondering if anyone has heard anything about this/ if someone who has graduated from GCSU can speak to this for me?

Thanks so much!

Haley

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Hello Haley,

I graduated from GCSU (Georgia College & State University) with my BSN in 2011 (just finished my MSN there May 2014). Unless the the program has changed dramatically in the past 3 years, I never had to travel 100+ miles for a clinical site. The school is located in Milledgeville, GA. Some clinicals are done at the local hospital while most are done at the larger hospital in Macon (30 mins from Milly).

In our community nursing class, we did have to travel to varying locations for our clinicals. Community nursing focused on home health, health department, and nurse politics. We were split up and spread around middle GA in order to get experience with doing these clinicals. In order to do that people were assigned different clinical sites (my cohort was 53 students) There was never a time while doing these clinicals that I had to drive more than 45 mins to get to a clinical site.

I guess I should mention that I was a commuter student actually residing about 30 minutes from Milledgeville so my commute was a little longer than someone living in milledgeville. There was only one trip we went on that had us driving to Atlanta (100+ miles). This trip involved us going to the capital building to lobby to the state respresenatives. We could have had buses, but most of my cohort was from Atlanta and opted to make our way up there individually. It wasn't bad and that was the only long trip we ever went on in my 2 years in the program.

As I mentioned before, many of my cohort were from the metro atlanta area. During our last semester which focused mainly on our practicum hours, some people did move back home finding clinical sites in Atlanta. These were done by request. Most people were paired with Preceptors in Macon and milledgeville.

I loved this program and definitely felt it prepared me adequately as a novice nurse. As mentioned before, I graduated three years ago so things may have changed but this was my experience. Good luck!!!

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Thanks so much for your response! It set my mind at ease.

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