Acceptance

So I'm getting ready to head out the door Friday morning for my trip to see my advisor at College #1 and I decide to check my email. Lo and behold there is an email from College #2 announcing my acceptance for Spring semester with a nice little message stating that I should contact the local university center for registration! Talk about timing! I quickly got on the phone to my cousin, cancelled my appointment with her, and set off instead for the local office of College #2.

I was able to go through walk-in registration and, while I wasn't able to get every single class I wanted, I was able to get the two that I really needed. Both were available as online courses, saving me the hassle of having to coordinate my work schedule around weekly classes. Woohoo!

Let me give you a little background into what I was aiming to do. There are three option here for getting your nursing degree in the city that I live in. Options A and B are for a two year associates degree to be a registered nurse. Option C is a one year intensive program for people who already hold a bachelor's degree in any area, resulting in graduation with a Bachelor of Science in nursing. I was aiming for Option C, which required a larger number of prerequisite classes, hoping for Fall of 2009 acceptance so that I'd be graduated by September of 2010. Option B is an on site program requiring me to physically attend classes each day, while Option A is an online program only requiring my physical presence at clinicals. Both of those options would only require me to take the prerequisite courses of Microbiology and Anatomy/Physiology as I've currently completed all of the other prerequisite courses.

As luck would have it I was able to enroll this semester in Microbiology and Anatomy/Physiology. I've decided now to change plans and aim for acceptance in Option A, while also applying for Option B as a back-up plan. Now I have to hope that I impress the hell out of the people who make the decision because they only choose 10 people per semester for the online program (Option A) and 25 for the on site program (Option B).

There's a part of me that would love to still enroll in the paramedic program that starts next month. However, I know that it's not fair to my kids or Mr. Irony to overburden myself like that. Plus, the paramedic program has a 6 week internship at the end with only 4 of those internships being offered in our city. The rest of the internships are in Denver, Seattle, Kansas City, and Sioux City. The only way to assure that I would get an internship here is to be ranked #1 or #2 in the course. I simply can't pick up and leave for 6 weeks at this point in life so that door is one that needs to remain closed for now. I might revisit it next fall if I'm not accepted into nursing school.

Now I'm waiting for the University to put me into their online course system so that I can access my classes. The books are ordered and shipped yesterday ($400 worth of textbooks for 2 courses!) and once I'm in the system I'm ready to learn. I'll be a week behind by the time I receive my books so I'll be playing catch-up with my first exam already looming in two weeks.