{"id":6554,"date":"2018-04-13T09:23:41","date_gmt":"2018-04-13T13:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/?p=6554"},"modified":"2018-04-16T11:38:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:38:27","slug":"gs-rotc-nursing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/2018\/04\/13\/gs-rotc-nursing\/","title":{"rendered":"Georgia Southern ROTC Nursing Program Leads the Nation"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Destinee
THE ELITE: Thanks to encouragement from her ROTC support system, Destinee Wesley is now a senior nursing student.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It takes a special kind of person to become an Army nurse.<\/p>\n

The demands upon the ROTC nursing student are relentless. In addition to nursing classes, medical training, clinicals and exams, they\u2019re also required to learn Army doctrine, perform rigorous physical training and field exercises, and participate in leadership training and competitions during coveted summer breaks. For many who enter the program, they decide it\u2019s too much.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s an attrition,\u201d said ROTC Scholarship and Enrollment Officer George Fredrick. \u201cIf I bring in 10 freshman nurse cadets \u2026 four years later, I probably have four who stick with nursing. The other cadets change majors. Everybody can\u2019t do that. They learn early in the pre-nursing phase. We\u2019re aware of those numbers, and we\u2019re aware of what it takes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the challenges for students and recruiters, however, Georgia Southern University\u2014for the fifth year in a row\u2014leads the nation in producing Army nurses. It\u2019s a formidable accomplishment Fredrick says is built on an essential partnership between ROTC and the School of Nursing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a longstanding great relationship with nursing,\u201d he said. \u201cWe cannot do this without their partnership. We cannot sustain this without them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now in its 20th year, the ROTC nursing program initially struggled to find the right students and help them get through to graduation and pinning. As the program continued to develop, the Army, too, was struggling to produce enough nurses each year. And after several U.S. military conflicts in the early 2000s, the call went out to all ROTC nursing programs around the country to produce more Army nurses … and quickly.<\/p>\n

In response, ROTC and the School of Nursing came together and developed a model to help students succeed. In this new model, on the nursing side, each class reserves five spots for ROTC nurses who meet the minimum requirements of the nursing program; and on the ROTC side, the program is rearranged to allow nursing students to get leadership training earlier in order to avoid the difficult overlap with clinicals.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a successful partnership that has brought the University national acclaim.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a good opportunity for us,\u201d said Melissa Garno, Ed.D., RN, professor and director of the Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a quality program, and we\u2019re helping educate the people that defend and serve our country.\u201d<\/p>\n

The program has been good for students, too.<\/p>\n

Destinee Wesley, a senior ROTC nursing student from Hephzibah, Georgia, says there have been many times she thought she couldn\u2019t do it, but always found the encouragement to keep going.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t think I was going to make it through my first semester of nursing school,\u201d she said. \u201cEverybody in ROTC\u2014when I would come in the building with a gray cloud over my head and bags under my eyes\u2014they would say, \u2018You\u2019re going to be fine,\u2019 and they would be smiling.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a good support system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wesley says she has now grown accustomed to waking up at 5 a.m., doing physical training, studying and then doing 12-hour clinical shifts at Memorial Medical Center in Savannah. It\u2019s a schedule not everyone wants to adopt.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe other nursing students always say, \u2018I don\u2019t know how you do it,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Fredrick says he knows ROTC nursing students are special. In order for him to find a new batch of these elite students, he has to find them in high school or early in their freshman year of college. He says the future looks especially bright now that our nursing program has expanded to the Armstrong Campus in Savannah, and he hopes to form strong partnerships there as well.<\/p>\n

ROTC nurses are a rare breed, and it takes hard work to fill those seats\u2014even harder to maintain the top spot in the nation with larger universities nipping at his heels.<\/p>\n

\u201cExcellence can only be sustained if everybody agrees to work hard,\u201d said Fredrick. \u201cOther schools would love to have this title. I\u2019m selfish. This is Georgia Southern!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014\u00a0Doy Cave<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It takes a special kind of person to become an Army nurse. The demands upon the ROTC nursing student are relentless. In addition to nursing classes, medical training, clinicals and exams, they\u2019re also required to learn Army doctrine, perform rigorous physical training and field exercises, and participate in leadership training and competitions during coveted summer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":6553,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[56],"class_list":["post-6554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-spring-2018"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}