Thoughts on Microbiology

[akulahawkRN, ADN, RN, EMT-P]

Micro? I'd take it in the Fall, if you're not actually in Nursing School right now. Why? Some of the experiments take a few days to run, and with a more drawn-out schedule, some of your experiments will actually have time to run to completion so that you can better make sense of the results. Sometimes you can have an experiment where half of it runs Monday – Wednesday and the second-half runs Wednesday – Friday and what you end up finding out in that one-week time is that some results take 3 – 5 days to complete. While you can do that with a condensed summertime course, you might not have enough time to run all of the different experiments and/or have enough time to run enough of them to get an understanding of what you need to do to be able to identify an organism.

As a nurse, chances are you will not be doing those experiments yourself, but at least you know the process that the lab goes through in order to determine what the organism/organisms are. The knowledge that you gain in microbiology will also give you an understanding as to why/how antibiotics work.

I am not saying that you should not take microbiology in a summertime course, I just simply think that you will probably get more out of it if you take it in the fall. Ultimately, you know your learning style best, the choice is yours!

[SexyFloridaGirl]

I completely agree with this. Some of our experiments when we were testing for an "unknown" organism as apart of a research portion of our course for a grade, depended on us waiting for test results, using proper sterile technique so that those results would be accurate and dependable, and what antibiotics were associated with that particular organism. Summer courses are often more condensed, leaving professors with not much option on elaborating on different course material/activities as otherwise would in a 16 week course (what we have is a 12 week as opposed to a 16 week in my state, not sure how the format is in others). In my personal experience, Microbiology was a very fun course, combining that biology that I love so much with a little bit of review Chemistry (you will need to refresh your memory! But nothing you can't handle of course :)). Even when taking it with my professor in the Spring, we still needed to skip over one activity that she had planned originally for Fall courses, so I would definitely say a summer course may confuse a student with trying to keep up with all the tests, results, and how those tests and techniques build on one another to combine and form a method of properly testing organisms and knowing what to look for, etc. I do wish I could go back to Micro instead of onward to nursing school!

[nwayne1012]

I am finishing up my 8 week summer session Microbiology class this week. If I could do it again I would take this class in a regular 16 week term. There is a lot of memorization of drug names, viruses, bacteria not to mention all the time spent in the lab running experiments. With that said, though, I am relieved to have it done and over with.