With the most recent ranking of APU’s nursing school at No. 8 in the nation by USA Today, it’s no wonder that heads are being turned in this major’s direction.
Admissions counselor Emily Kemp said that APU receives about 800 applications for the School of Nursing every year, and “only about 100 of those are selected,” she said.
Junior nursing student Trisha Snowden remembered how competitive it was to get accepted.
“Our average GPA in high school was a 4.2,” Snowden said, also adding the fact that there were a series of essays that had to be written when applying to the program.
Steven Young, a sophomore nursing student, believes it’s so competitive because “we applied [for nursing] before freshman year while most other schools have you apply after you finish your General Education.”
Known for a selective application process, once in the program, students experience rigorous clinical days.
Sophomore Erin Loo said that she’s working on a hospital’s bone marrow transplant floor. She said once during a clinical day she observed surgeons remove a uterine cyst from a patient the size of a softball.
Young is currently working on a stroke and spinal injury floor. Young said the craziest thing he had encountered “was a patient that had fallen six stories from a parking garage and had survived it but became paralyzed from the waist down.”
As for Snowden, her clinicals have been at an elementary school, Los Angeles Department of Health, City of Hope in Duarte and Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, where she currently works as a nursing assistant.
“I’ve seen a code rapid response, which is when your patient isn’t doing so well,” Snowden said. “There was also a patient last semester who had gotten shot in the head two times, and I got to see her get speech, occupational and physical therapy. Seeing a patient walk after a brain injury was the first time I ever had tears over a patient, because we watched him when he could barely stand to when he walked through a door two weeks later.”
The hectic clinical shifts take their toll on the students’ free time and ability to rest.
“You have to make it, honestly you have to sacrifice something and it’s usually sleep,” Snowden said. “On the weekends, I try to give myself one day of not doing anything because you have to take care of yourself.”
Loo agreed that a social life is possible, but it is a give-and-take relationship.
Young had a different opinion on this matter. He doesn’t think “nursing is any harder than any other major—everyone’s struggling through school. We just have a day where we go to the hospital,” he said.
With so many specialties nursing students can choose after graduation, Snowden specified that she would like to work in the neonatal intensive care unit.
“The babies come out addicted to drugs, or have birth complications or are born premature,” Snowden said. “That’s where my heart is.”
Young wants to work in the emergency room.
“But I’ve been considering going into physical therapy, specifically around sports rehab,” Young said.
When asked about her postgraduation plans, Loo said it’s hard to say what might happen.
“I want to go into pediatrics, maybe even [working on] bone marrow transplant [procedures],” Loo said.
While Snowden says that she knew she wanted to become a nurse since freshman year in high school, Young was a little more hesitant.
“I was always leaning toward health care,” he said. “The more I prayed about it, the more I felt led to nursing.”
For some students, other influences play a role in what field they choose.
“When I went to South Africa for a missions trip, I knew that I would want to go into something that I could integrate easily with missions work,” Loo said. “There’s such a need for it [in third world countries] and that pushed me to go into nursing because I could help provide that. As long as God kept opening doors for me, I would continue with it.”