NP school...what's it like?

Going to school to become a nurse practitioner is different from many other schooling options in the healthcare field. Nursing school is your very first introduction to the healthcare field. You learn health assessment, pharmacology, med-surg, critical care, pediatrics, women’s health, and much more. NP school builds on your knowledge as a nurse and takes it to a higher level. Let’s just go through the basics of what NP school is like.

There are MANY different options for what kind of NP you want to be. Nowadays, fortunately and unfortunately, you have to pick what your primary path will be (family/primary care, women’s health, nurse anesthetist, acute care, etc). Then you have to decide what degree track you will take, a doctorate degree or master’s degree.

I completed a DNP program (Doctor of Nursing Practice) and skipped over getting my MSN (Master of Science in Nursing). Many programs are transitioning to become doctorate-level programs but there are still master-level NP programs out there that are fantastic. All programs will start with some basic leadership, theory, and evidence-based practice classes. You get your advanced health assessment, advanced pharmacology, and more classes within your specific area of expertise.

Then, once you have passed your basic foundational courses, you get to clinicals (yay!). Some schools will help you find clinical sites, and others want you to find your own. If you have to find your own, I suggest calling and emailing office managers at whatever location you are wanting to go to. You can also write up a letter and create a student business card with your contact information to drop off in person to the office managers.

At some point in your program, you will have a capstone/thesis/final project that you will have to do in order to graduate. This project is often very in-depth and very time-consuming. The best advice I got about this project was to choose something you really like because by the end of the project you just might still kind of like it. Basically, you spend hundreds of hours doing research, writing papers, and completing the project so don’t pick something you don’t like, because you will hate it by the end.

My personal experience was that NP school was “easier” than nursing school. I say this because I had nursing school foundation knowledge and real-world experience to build on whereas going into nursing school, I was learning everything from scratch. NP school is longer, more intense, and very different than nursing school because you are now becoming a provider. All in all, NP school is nursing school on steroids. You have to decide if that is something you are willing to do and ready to take on a higher level of responsibility. For me, it was really tough at some points, but I love what I do now and I am so happy that I chose to go back to school.