Bellevue College

My Experience:

While the cost of the Bellevue Nursing Program is the most competitive in our region, the program is less than subpar. I was accepted to the Winter 2019 cohort and, after just one month, albeit a very long month, I am withdrawing. The orientation should have been a red flag. We, the new cohort arrived on time, but staff, specifically the Nursing Program Chair (NPC), was late. Then, what should have been a four hour orientation was stuffed into three hours; and four would have been grossly inadequate. The NPC then proceeded to pass out a great deal of unorganized paperwork and shared an abundance of anecdotal information with us; however, when students asked substantive questions, such as which textbooks on a list we should order, it was difficult to get a clear answer. Next, the person who coordinates clinicals, Amanda, gave us ...a real talking to...about the paperwork and other things we needed to complete in order to participate in clinicals. She emphasized that she would not be “tracking us down” in pursuit of incomplete paperwork. Fair enough, but her delivery was better suited for a group of children on probation for having committed some egregious acts, rather than for the group of adults sitting before her who had completed two years of prerequisites and a long application process to earn their spots in the program. Ultimately, I (and we) left with more questions than answers, which did give me pause; however, I decided to attribute the failings of the orientation to the holiday crunch. Not. So.

Once school began, nothing was different from the staff approach we experienced at orientation. The work itself wasn’t hard, but the level of disorganization and lack of instruction was times 10. That is not simply my opinion, but rather the observation of many in our cohort. We were given massive amounts of work and reading, but no real instruction. After a month, I cannot honestly say that I’ve learned anything new, with the exception of a head to toe assessment; however, there was little instruction about the rationale behind the steps involved in the assessment. During the first day of clinicals, our clinical instructor who teaches nursing classes at Shoreline asked our group to speak to the rationales behind the actions involved in the head to toe assessment. None of us could provide more than the most basic of responses because our BCC nursing instructors hardly touched on rationales behind anything we were doing. The clinical instructor then told about us the depth of teaching and learning that the Shoreline nursing students experience in just the first quarter, and it was more than obvious that we were missing out on the same. The BCC NPC who also teaches NURS 120 made two very distinct comments to our class. On DAY ONE she said, “The odds are in your favor” to fail a class and have to retake it, which could potentially set any of us back an entire year. That was on day one, which unfortunately (and unavoidably) set the tone for the next month. Next, about a week ago as of this review the NPC commented that BCC unfortunately never graduates a cohort of 32, and her tone implied it was for the failings of students. That may, in part, be accurate, but I would challenge that perhaps a greater portion of the responsibility lies with the failings of the program instructors themselves. 

There are other issues that arose in the short month I was in attendance, some of which I and at least one other person addressed directly with the NPC. One item was the lack of direction (yes, it’s a theme) on what to study for exams. For each section of instruction, the class was given an outline with the required chapter reading (approximately 10 for the first two of days of class), vocabulary to learn and a list of objectives to achieve. Then the NPC would read PowerPoints to us in class, many of which she didn’t create, and generally spend so much time talking about her opinions (particularly about the ineptitude of doctors...WTF) that we wouldn’t get to the more critical aspects of the material, and often skip entire PowerPoints. I mean, she would go on 20 minute tangents about things I can’t even recall now because of the complete irrelevance to the material. I started to get anxiety when this would begin because I knew we weren’t going to make it to the material that was on the schedule. Her solution: read it at home. And when we were able to get through material, she would often instruct us to throw out several slides, or to completely disregard some information because it wouldn’t be on her exams. While that was helpful sometimes, we weren’t always in the position to have that instruction since we rarely made it to all of the material. That = a waste of our time. The exams were fairly easy if one studied, but we never went over the results of the exams. That made little sense because, well, how were we supposed to know where to improve? 

Unsolicited, my above experiences were echoed by 2nd quarter students that I met during my short time in the program, except they thought their experiences were worse because of last minute clinical cancellations during their first quarter. 

I could really go on and point to additional concrete failings of the BCC Nursing Program, but I won’t. My goal here is to better inform those considering the BCC Nursing Program. I was led to believe that it was one of the top ADN programs in the Seattle area, and even turned down an invitation to another program that was 30 minutes closer to my house in order to attend BCC. While I believe that no program is perfect, and that all will have some inherent level of chaos and disorganization, there is an obvious arrogance to the BCC Nursing Program that creates additional and unnecessary challenges for its students. 

What Did You Like?

Aspects of the program that I truly appreciated: 

1) My interactions with Jorja. Unfortunately, however, her role is purely administrative and, after acceptance, there was little need for interaction with her. 

2) Jean Dendy, another instructor with whom we had only limited interaction. The day Jean came to our NURS 120 class and gave us a brief overview of SIM lab, we were all taken aback by her demeanor because it was so counter to our experience of the teaching staff up to that point. She was kind and made an effort to relate to the experience she knew we were having as brand new nursing students. That we hadn’t experienced from anyone else up to that point. Sad.

What Didn't You Like?

See my initial comments.