“Oh my God, there are more elements!” When Alison Schlenger, forty-six, of Marietta, Georgia, returned to college to become a registered nurse, she was surprised to see that the periodic table of elements had grown since her college days twenty years ago. “At first I thought, ‘this is really bad, maybe I shouldn’t be here,” Schlenger says. But now she thinks that nursing school is “exactly where I’m supposed to be. When you get in your forties, who says you can’t take on a big challenge and try something new and fresh?”
Schlenger will graduate from the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University in Atlanta in May. A former social worker with a master’s degree, she is one of a growing number of women with college degrees and work experience in other fields entering nursing as a second career. Nursing schools across the country have noted the increasing number of experienced workers who want to become R.N.s and have established new programs, often called accelerated B.S.N.s, which allow these students to earn a nursing degree in as little as twelve intense months.
Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, started its one year B.S.N program in 2001 with only seven students. Now the program has fifty students and turns away many more. “The demand is high for several reasons,” says Janice Thompson, B.S.N., M.S.N., Ph.D., and the university’s nursing chair. “The public sees the nursing shortage and the tremendous variety of opportunities in nursing today,” she points out. “There is a lot of career advancement for nurses and it’s a career that you can balance with a family and continuing education. Nurses have more responsibility and respect than we used to. Pay has gotten better, too.”
But the top reason women in their thirties, forties, and even fifties turn to nursing as a second career, Thompson says, is dissatisfaction with their current job. “We look for students who have a genuine desire to help people,” she says.
Windy Clement, forty-three, who has a Bachelor’s degree in business and a Master’s in art history, enrolled in Emory’s nursing school when “working with money was no longer fulfilling.” As an older student, she can’t stay out all night and then come in the next day and ace a test like some younger ones, but she believes that mature students are better at communicating with doctors, other health care workers and patients. The memorization in the nursing curriculum can be difficult, she says, although Emory’s focus on critical thinking is “an intellectual delight.” Clement plans to become a pediatric oncology nurse.
Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles was the first in the Western United States to offer a fast track B.S.N. for second degree students, graduating its first class in 1995. Professor Emeritus Mary Sloper, R.N., M.N., who led the program’s development, says the Mount has far more qualified applicants than expected, even though the program is “rigorous beyond rigor.” She says, “A student must make a major commitment to be successful. Their families must be supportive. If you have made the Thanksgiving turkey for the past twelve years, this is the year to get someone else to take it on.”
“I’ve had to devote myself completely to succeeding,” says Jane Pressman, fifty, who attends the one year B.S.N. program at Mount St. Mary’s. “College is harder the second time around, but it’s keeping my brain young.”
A former graphic designer, Pressman worked in advertising for the entertainment industry and then became a hypnotherapist while searching for a way to manage her job stress. Hypnotherapy led her to psychiatric nursing. She plans to continue on for a Master’s degree and become a nurse practitioner with an independent practice. “Nursing is not an ageist profession and I can see myself doing it for a long time to come,” she says. “We’re living in a different time, when it’s common to have two or three careers in a lifetime.”
