Volume 12, Number 2, 2003
Mark Sanford graduated from college in 1996 with a degree in wildlife biology and took a job as an environmental educator and skipjack captain, piloting a small boat on the Chesapeake Bay. He says he enjoyed the work, but after several years, he found himself wishing for a career where he could make a more tangible difference in people's lives.
Today, he's enrolled in the College of Health and Nursing Sciences' Accelerated Nursing Program.
"Environmental work is important, but you don't notice any immediate effects," Sanford says. "With nursing, you're able to help people directly and see the results right there in front of you."
After just 13 months of intensive classroom and clinical work, Sanford and about 40 classmates will achieve their goals--a bachelor's degree in nursing and, for most of them, a new career. The accelerated program is for students who already have earned a bachelor's degree in another field and later decide to pursue a nursing degree.
"We have a wide range of ages and backgrounds among our students," Lisa Ann Plowfield, chairperson of the CHNS Department of Nursing, says. "They could be one year out of school or 20 years out of school, but they're all looking for some kind of career change."
The Accelerated Nursing Program, she says, allows such students to earn a second bachelor's degree relatively quickly, in a field where they are virtually guaranteed a job. With the national shortage of registered nurses, such accelerated programs have the potential to provide some quick relief for what many experts consider a crisis in American health care, Plowfield says. Similar programs are increasingly popular around the country.
The UD program, now in its 10th year, aims to enroll about 30 students for each class, but faculty and clinical opportunities have been "stretched to the limit" to accommodate 42 in the current group, Plowfield says.
Students in the accelerated program fall into three general categories, according to Cynthia Diefenbeck, CHNS '95, an instructor in nursing and the program's student recruiter. She says about a third of each class consists of students who just graduated from UD and decided immediately to go into nursing instead of seeking a job in their original major. Another third is made up of students in their late 20s or early 30s who have worked for several years in another field before deciding to make a change. The remaining students are older and have had longer careers, from which they may recently have retired or been downsized.
"We really do have an amazing variety," Diefenbeck says. "We've had lawyers, chemists, computer programmers and others who had successful and specialized careers, as well as students who just graduated but decided on nursing too late to change their first undergraduate major."
What all the students have in common, Plowfield says, is the belief that nursing will provide them not only with job security but also with personal fulfillment. "Often, they've become dissatisfied with their first career, and they want a job that they will find more meaningful," she says.
Members of the current class express a desire to help others, as well as an assortment of practical considerations. Nancy Watson, who worked as a registered dietitian for nine years, says she wants to increase her opportunities for employment in case her husband's job requires the family to relocate.
Respiratory therapist Win Nguyen, also with nine years in his first career, has decided he wants to specialize in anesthesia nursing, which requires a master's degree in nursing. He chose the accelerated program for his bachelor of nursing degree, as a way to jump-start his new career path. "I have a wife and a 2-year-old, so I wanted a program that would further my career goals as quickly as possible," says Nguyen, who plans to work in critical care nursing while pursuing his graduate degree in anesthesia.
For Bernadette Wood, AG '84, who earned her first degree in animal science and plans to continue to work on a family farm while also working as a nurse, "This program isn't about changing careers. It's about adding a career."
The accelerated program also is popular with health-care employers, Plowfield says. Hospitals that offer financial support to nursing students, in exchange for their promise to work there after graduation, see a quick return on their investment, she says.
"These students enter the nursing profession very rapidly, in just over a year, so that's a big benefit to employers who don't want to wait four years," she says. "Employers also like the fact that the accelerated students are more mature and that they graduate off the normal sequence, in January instead of May, so there are even more job opportunities for them."
Before beginning the full-time Accelerated Nursing Program, students must have some prerequisite science courses, which may or may not have been part of their first undergraduate degree, depending on their major. They also all take an online nursing course during the fall semester to prepare for the program. Full-time classroom and clinical work then begins on campus in early January and, with a break of only a couple of weeks in August, is completed at the end of the following January.
"It's an intensive program, but these students are generally very focused on their goals and highly motivated," Plowfield says.
Diefenbeck agrees, saying, "These are people who bring a wealth of experience and motivation to their new careers. We really are producing top-quality graduates."
--Ann Manser, AS '73, CHEP '73