If only becoming a nurse was as straightforward as when I went to design school. Back then, I identified a school that fit with my life (had a night program so I could raise my son during the day) and I signed up for classes. Done and done.
Not so with nursing it seems.
Turns out, although there is a huge shortage of nurses, there is a massive bottleneck of nurse-educators, which makes getting into a program super competitive. So my ideal first choice of staying close to home, friends and church while going to school may not be possible. Yesterday I spent most of Thanksgiving putting together a massive spreadsheet to do a competitive analysis of all of the schools in my region, and some out of state options, just to get a handle on some possible pathways into nursing.
And then there are more and more questions that pile on. Should I get the quickie 2 year ADN-RN or, since I'm in school anyway...go straight for the 4 year BSN? I have a total of 5.5 years of college so far, so that seems reasonable. But if the limited number of public BSN programs are so hard to get into and I need to wait a year to get into a program (as many wannabe students do) --should I then think about the lesser LPN option, just to get to work faster? And at some point, I may get impatient and decide to cough up and head to a private school if it means I could finish faster.
The impatient me is just chomping at the bit to get on with it already.
Regardless -- any pathway I head down will still require the same basic batch of prereqs and I'll be chipping away at them starting next month. At the same time I'll be hooking up some volunteer hours at a local hospital for some work experience that will look good on the applications. I'm really looking forward to that, since I'll get a semi-immersion look at the field.
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