Nurse Practitioner Panel at HC

Hey everyone! This past Wednesday Liz Farrington, Julia Cambria and I (via skype) had a panel that talked about Nurse Practitioner(NP) as a career.  It was so nice to finally be able to share my experiences with fellows HC students about the NP route and what they need to do to get there. According to Liz, we had a good turn out 🙂  Students asked us a lot of great questions. It was nice to hear how much HC has changed  in order to accommodate students who are interested in other health care profession such as NP, Physician Assistant, Occupational Therapist, Physical Therapist to name a few. Professor Futterman, Head of the Pre-health program , said that they had 22 NP applications this past year, in comparison to other years where the norm was between 4-8 applications.

Liz and I were talking how jealous we are because HC has also added some courses she and I needed to get into NP school. Course such as Anatomy & Physiology I &II(AP1&2), they have added several additional sections of statistics, as well as microbiology and medical microbiology. When Liz and I were at HC( which is less than 2 years ago), we had to take AP 1 & 2,  microbiology ,  and nutrition at other schools in the Worcester Consortium since HC didn’t offer them. By adding these course only helps to smooth the transition into preparing students for their future careers.

Another interesting aspect is that even though Liz, Julia and I are all in NP school. All our programs are all very different which I think was nice for students to hear.  My program you graduate with a BSN and a MSN .Whereas Liz and Julia’s program you graduate with just an MSN. It was nice to hear their experiences and motivation in attending nursing school. I really feel that it  helped some students in understanding the various paths one can take in order to become an advanced practice nurse.

I am so happy we decided to organize this panel. I will admit it was kind of weird with me skyping into the panel( I live the farthest away from HC in comparison to Julia and Liz who were able to attend in person) but it worked! LOL. My next goal , hopefully, is to get the HC magazine to do a piece about how students at HC are entering various other health professions such as the ones mentioned before.  I feel a piece like this would reach out to other HC alumni who went a similar route.  These alumni  probably would love to be an additional resource for current HC students who are interested in these healthcare fields.  We shall see 🙂

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