UTA BSN-MSN Needs Insight

luvinmylife197 · May 3, 2018

Hi,

I am nearing the end of my MSN in Administration at UTA. After this current class wraps next week I will have three 5 week classes left, two of which will be completed over the summer. Its hard, but its doable. I enrolled in the RN-MSN program in June 2015, and now it is almost over.

I have worked full time during my RN to BSN and now through my MSN. The classes go so fast it seems you aren't really learning anything but, turns out, I have learned a LOT! Greatest piece of advice I can give you is to model all of your projects and assignments around your real life job. I am an assistant director of nursing for a California state run facility, a mother, married, and I work night shift. Trust me when I say my life is scheduled to the MAX!

Once I realized the key was using my real life issues experienced at work for my class assignments, my anxiety went down phenomenally, and I was able to overlap research needed in both work and school. Stay in contact with your academic coach, be proactive on assignments and you will be fine.

However, depending on the coach and professor, get used to the idea that a perfect paper means 95% sometimes in graduate school. On more than one occasion I have received a 95 on a paper, reached out to my coach for identifying areas of improvement because I do not see corrections on the rubric, to be told that this is graduate school and even if there are no errors, there is no such thing as a perfect paper. I've just had to learn to let that stuff go.

Last fall I experienced some problems during the wildfire disaster that occurred in Northern California. I was evacuated from my home and spent the first week in shelter with my patients who were also evacuated and holed up in the gymnasium of a middle school. When I was able to reach out to my coach, she and the entire faculty, including the dean, as well as my advisors were very gracious in allowing me to drop the current class I was enrolled in and allowed me to roll back into the same class concurrently in the next session. They assisted me so much during such a trying time, I absolutely cannot say enough about the support I received. Beyond that, I would not advise attempting to take more then one class at a time while doing your MSN portion. During my BSN I would take a full course load, and at one time managed a full 20 unit semester and still graduated on the Dean's list with my undergrad. I wouldn't dream of attempting to take more then one of the graduate classes at a time. They can be very intense.

I wish you the best. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you or offer support. You can do this. You're a nurse...you've made it this far, you will see this through. As hard as graduate school has been, it is nothing in comparison to the complete shock to the system that the first semester of nursing school was. It doesn't get easier, but we definitely get tougher. Nurses are a different breed. There is a reason why they say we are superheroes without the capes.

"It won't be easy. But it will be worth it."