Nursing students deserve our respect

Last week, while reading through the nominees for Senior Honor Awards, I was truly impressed by my peers and proud of their contributions to the Penn community.

But there was one thing glaringly missing from the list: Of the 30 senior nominees, not one was from the School of Nursing.

I was not entirely surprised, to be honest. It was just another example of Nursing getting unfairly overlooked at Penn.

From the moment New Student Orientation begins freshman year, Nursing students are stigmatized.

Nursing junior Joanna Hilburn felt it instantly upon moving in three years ago. "There were a couple of guys in my hall who thought they were innately better than us because they were in Wharton," she said.

It is true that the Nursing School has the highest acceptance rate of Penn's four undergraduate schools.

But once they arrive at Penn, Nursing students face one of the most rigorous curriculums of any of Penn's four undergraduate schools.

With a minimum of 40.5 required credit units needed to graduate, Nursing students must take more than five credits per semester to finish in four years. By comparison, as a Political Science major in the College, I have to complete a mere 32 credits to graduate.

Still, many non-Nursing students falsely assume that all Nursing courses are simple.

"The one Nursing class I took was the easiest class I've ever taken at Penn," said College junior Kyle Madden-Peister, who took Nutrition. "And that says something, because I look for easy classes."

But Nutrition, Victimology and Forensic Science -- notoriously easy courses that are popular among Wharton students for fulfilling science requirements -- are not typical Nursing classes. In fact, Nursing students cannot even use those classes to fulfill their graduation requirements.

Just ask Laura Rich, who graduated from Penn in 2005 with a dual degree in the Nursing School and the Wharton School.

"My nursing classes were much more difficult than the majority of my Wharton classes," she said.

Or, better yet, skip your classes and shadow Nursing upperclassmen on days when they have medical training.

You will wake up at about 5:30 in order to get to "clinical" by 6:45 a.m. -- sometimes as far away as Delaware. And that's just the beginning.

Wharton, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and School of Arts and Sciences students can't "tell me that they have had their patient die in the morning and then have to walk straight from the hospital to a math exam," Hilburn said.

Hilburn has 12 hours of classroom instruction and 12 hours of class at the hospital each week. That is the equivalent of taking eight courses in one semester, and in the Nursing School that is merely an average load for an upperclassman. Some students have up to 30 hours of class each week.

Nursing students must also complete a language requirement, as well as other core requirements outside of the Nursing School.

"Our degree is a lot more flexible than people realize," Hilburn said. "If nursing just isn't what you want to do ... you can use the degree as a background for medical school, public health or social policy and planning."

And, if nursing is what you want to do, there are plenty of recruiters knocking on your door. There is high demand for nurses, particularly graduates from a prestigious program such as Penn's. The average salary for 2005 Nursing graduates was $49,500, according to the Office of Career Services.

The School of Nursing, which accepts an average class of about 75 students each year, comprises a very small portion of Penn's about 10,000 undergraduates, so many students have little interaction with the Nursing School.

"I've never taken a Nursing class, but I had a class in the Nursing building. Does that count?" Engineering and Applied Science graduate student Ian Glastein said.

It's understandable that some students have trouble comprehending what Nursing students go through. But it's time that we start recognizing the important role the Nursing School plays on this campus.

Did you know, for example, that it brings in millions of dollars of funding from the National Institutes of Health to Penn each year? Or that it is consistently ranked as one of the top three nursing programs in U.S. News & World Report rankings?

It is pathetic that educated Penn students can be so naive about the role that nurses play in the world. While studying the anatomy of the human skull, one student asked Nursing senior Kelley Martin, "Why are you studying that? Don't nurses just take blood pressure and stuff?"

"Nursing celebrates the human spirit, and that's why I love it," Martin said. "For those who cannot appreciate that, ... how sad."

Let's all start appreciating the Nursing School.

Josh Pollick is a senior political science major from Los Angeles. On Point appears on Mondays.

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