Registered Nurse Prerequisites

If you like taking care of sick people and assisting in their recovery, a career in nursing would be a good option for you.  A degree in nursing is required for entering the medical profession as a nurse.  But to acquire this degree you will have to make sure you have the necessary nursing prerequisites.

To start with, all aspiring nurses must be high school graduates or possess a GED.  Not just that, they need to maintain an excellent grade point average when they are in high school besides attending classes like biology and health science that are pertinent to a nursing major.

You will have to start out with either an associate’s or bachelor’s degree in nursing.  Acquiring an associate’s degree could help in getting admission into bachelor’s degree programs that sometimes have really long waiting lists.  However, the associate’s as well as bachelor’s programs offer classroom experience and also clinical practice as part of their curriculum.

To make sure you have the necessary prerequisites, plan your course of study with the help of your school counselor, preferably one who is knowledgeable about what is required for obtaining a nursing degree.  If you fail to take any of the essential courses, you will have to spend the summer in college completing them.

Unfortunately, most universities and colleges offer only a limited number of courses in the summer.  So if the course you overlooked is not provided in the summer, you will have to wait till the Fall or Spring semester to complete the missing class.  Students who are faced with such a problem should talk to their guidance counselor and find out if a similar course available at another university would be accepted in place of the missing nursing prerequisite.  Moreover, nowadays many colleges and universities offer LPN Nursing classes online.  Hence, you could also discuss this option with your guidance counselor.  But either way, you will require the written permission of your counselor or your program director for attending an outside school for making such classes count in place of the missing nursing prerequisites.

No matter if you are going back to college, moving from one community college to another one, or going to college straight from high school, you will have to fulfill certain nursing prerequisites for obtaining your nursing degree.  Each nursing college or university may have has their own specific course prerequisites, but nearly all of them require nursing candidates to satisfactorily complete courses in:

• Nutrition (3 credits)
• Anatomy and Physiology (6-8 credits)
• Microbiology (4 credits)
• Chemistry (4 credits)
• Statistics (3 credits)
• Psychology (3 credits)
• Sociology (3 credits)

However, some institutions permit certain courses to be replaced by others such as Psychology, Economics, or some type of Math course in place of Statistics. Also, most of them will permit a small number of relevant transfer credits from some other accredited school in case students don’t meet all the requirements.  But it is primarily the responsibility of the student to check if such courses satisfy the new school’s nursing prerequisites.