The Advance

Issue date: 2/4/10 Section: News

Media Credit: Sydnie Abel

Imagine this: waking up at the crack of dawn every other morning to go lift weights, spending between 4 and 5 hours a day in classes or at a hospital, and going back to the gym to spend another two to three hours at softball practice. Try doing this every day, along with the other usual aspects of being a college student, like endless homework, countless tests and quizzes, and the much needed daily nap, and you've got yourself one heck of a busy schedule.

This is precisely what KWU junior Brecken McDaniel does with her time. She is one of this year's 40 students that were accepted into the Nursing program at Kansas Wesleyan University. In addition to being a nursing major, McDaniel is also a member of the softball team, and she admits that it is very hard to juggle the two things. "It just seems like we're never at practice because we're always at the hospital or at class, and it's just hard to do both," she says.

And indeed, there are a large number of courses that students have to pass to be able to finish the program. In order to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree from KWU, students must earn a minimum of 126 academic credit hours with cumulative GPA of 2.0 or higher. McDaniel also adds that besides just the basic core classes, one must also have a certain number of hours of clinical classes, which involve either going to a hospital or a doctor's office to get more real life experience than you would in a classroom. "If we go to the hospital we have our own patients that we care for. For example, the night before, we go there and get information on them and then we take care of them the whole time we're there. And if we go to a doctor's office, we get to follow a nurse around and do whatever they do for the whole day." McDaniel adds.

When asked why she chose nursing, McDaniel states that, just like any other student deciding what to major in, at first she wasn't sure. In fact, for the longest time she wanted to be a teacher. However, when she was a junior in high school, her aunt was in an accident. "I didn't like the care she was getting, and I wanted to be able to change that." So she chose to come to KWU, partially because of softball, but also because Kansas Wesleyan has a very good Nursing program and it wasn't too far from home. McDaniel also liked how the campus wasn't too big, how the teachers were nice and willing to help, and how much "hands on experience" she would get during the program.

"Above all, the teachers here are really awesome and always willing to help, and we get a lot of hands on experience. We actually learn and see what nurses get to do, and that's a major part of it." McDaniel also says that the only unpleasant thing about the program is the amount of reading that she has to do, but in the end, she says that it's worth it. The extra time and amount of hard work that is put it by the nursing students are a benefit to everyone else in our country. Without nurses, who knows how many more deaths would occur at hospitals and other nursing care institutions. More often than not, it's the nurses that save a patient, not the doctors, and for this, we should all be grateful.

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