Nursing School Update — Approaching Roadblock

Class­es at Colum­bia Col­lege have been absolute­ly fan­tas­tic, as I work to earn the sci­ence cred­its lacked by my Bach­e­lor of Arts degree in Com­put­er Sci­ence. I’ve now tak­en Pre-chem and Clin­i­cal Micro­bi­ol­o­gy with lab in-seat in the evenings and have achieved sol­id A’s in both.

Alas, nei­ther A counts towards the Sci­ence GPA that will be eval­u­at­ed in con­junc­tion with my even­tu­al per­for­mance on the ATI TEAS VI exam, but they are good indi­ca­tor, that, with the prop­er accom­mo­da­tions, as well as increased matu­ri­ty, I can per­form well in aca­d­e­m­ic pursuits.

This ses­sion I am reluc­tant­ly tak­ing a 3 hr course in Med­ical Ter­mi­nol­o­gy that won’t count towards either the Asso­ciates in Nurs­ing or BSN in order to meet min­i­mum enroll­ment hours for my finan­cial aid pack­age. I have hopes that it at least will be ben­e­fi­cial in future cours­es, though a great deal of it is review.

Fol­low­ing this course my progress will be at a stand­still until I can fig­ure out a way to pay for school. I’ve exact­ly one year of course­work remain­ing (course sched­ule per­mit­ting) before I would be ready to apply to the Nurs­ing pro­gram. I’ve reached the aggre­gate lim­it for sub­si­dized fed­er­al loans (and I had hoped not to accrue more debt for this). My attempts to find full-time employ­ment with Colum­bia Col­lege which would yield the ben­e­fits of a full tuition waiv­er have so far proven unsuc­cess­ful, but thank­ful­ly my exist­ing employ­ment, due to end July 31, has been extend­ed for anoth­er full year, so I am secure… if not able to advance my degree pursuit.

I am decid­ing to treat this as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to try to get cre­ative and to be care­ful with my bud­get to see if I can­not man­u­fac­ture a way to con­tin­ue… like­ly not in the fall, but per­haps in the spring semester.

Pray­ing and trust­ing God. Very grate­ful for what I’ve been giv­en so far and for the pro­vi­sions and oppor­tu­ni­ties. So aware of how blessed I am. 

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