Widener University

Date: Dec 11 2012
Major: Nursing (This Major's Salary over time)
Well, I am in the new curriculum. First year I went here, I enjoyed college experience a lot because classes were not incredibly hard with prerequisites like BioChem/ Orgo, electives, and etc. (I encourage you to transfer all your credits like I did) What my philosophy was back then was that hard work should be able to pay off in the end, right? Sometimes, it takes more than just hard work and effort for nursing school. Everyone who expects to graduate on time needs to be devoted into studying unless you are born naturally smart and very good at test taking. Upper division is nowhere like lower division and I want you to be prepared to what you are down for.

If you are dedicated and good at test taking, definitely go for this program. But some advice is that in upper division, it's not about memorizing anymore. There is a different approach to nursing by using the nursing process with critical thinking, application, and applying the knowledge. You can be a perfect A or B student first two years of college and then when it comes to upper division, it is like a smack in the head. No matter how hard you work, how motivated you are, the final exams and Hesi's are what determines whether you pass or not. You have a Hesi for every major class you take.

There was around 50% of people dropping out of the nursing program because of how the tests were worded and how the answers can be so similar and you have to pick out the correct one. There was barely time to study because you have two 7 hours of clinical each week. At the same time, you have to balance all of your 16 credit courses. ALSO there are around 4-5 chapters each week from your classes that you need to go over to prepare.

The professors expect you to know everything and can't seem to grasp the idea that we are new nurses who don't have a Ph.D like you do. They may seem to be nice to everyone but they talk about how horrible the upper division is doing this year to their sophomore classes. They think we don?t study and work hard. They just changed the program and you can?t expect it?s going to work perfectly. They make the nursing program harder than it should be so people drop out and more people come in to replace. Even though the professors say we weren?t guinea pigs in the program, I felt like a guinea pig being experimented on how well their program was and wasted 50k on this school.