NEED ADVICE ABOUT NURSING?

Need advice about nursing school! help please!?

• I want to get a bachelors degree in nursing. The thing is, I HAVE to go to a community college my first year of college, then i want to transfer to Texas A&M in College Station.. i need advice about nursing school and how many years of pre-reqs, etc. All i know is I want to be a nurse but i have no clue how college and nursing school work together. PLEASE HELP!!! :(

• Answer:

  You need to get together with an academic advisor to plan your courses. You should become familiar with the A&M admissions requirements - this information is usually readily available on the school's website if you take the time to search for it. Once you know their requirements, you need to ask which courses you can take at your community college of choice which will be accepted in transfer towards those admissions requirements. Keep in mind that not all courses transfer equally - one school's biology course might differ slightly from another and you might have to take it all over again. So you MUST ask these questions ahead of time. Then you just get to work. You take the common pre-reqs an general education courses first to get those out of the way (and save money) at the community college. You'll definitely need general biology (with lab), general chemistry (with lab), anatomy & physiology (with lab), and gen eds will include freshman English Composition, a speech / communications course, psychology & developmental psychology, and a few others. Find out from A&M how many elective credits you can take and you could work on those too. I highly recommend completing as many of the non-nursing courses as you can ahead of time so you can focus only on nursing once you eventually start, because each credit of nursing feels like double or triple the work compared to non-nursing courses. It's very time consuming. It's not necessarily hard and complicated, but there is a high volume of content that you have to learn in a short amount of time. Tons of reading each week. Not really a lot of time for other courses. So if you're going for a BSN, full-time, it should take you about 4 years. That's assuming you have seamless transfer and get accepted into the nursing program immediately. That's where my warning comes in: A&M is a large, popular university and admission is going to be HIGHLY competative. You will need to ask if they even accept transfer students, or if non-transfer students get a certain admissions preference. You should also ask them what the average GPA is of students admitted to the nursing major - their admissions rep for their nursing program should have this information available, along with how many applicants they get vs. how many spots are awarded. You need to know what you're up against. You also need a back up plan. Investigate other schools in your area that have nursing programs. Are your odds getting in somewhere else better? Is your goal to become a nurse, or to go to your dream school? What's the priority? Do you have to get a BSN first, or can you get your ADN at a community college first, get a job somewhere that pays tuition reimbursement, and then complete your BSN through a bridge program a year or two later (which are traditionally not as competative for entry)? Lots to consider and plan for. You need to do the footwork and ask questions of the schools directly. Best of luck.