A guide to helping you successfully apply to nursing school and help jump start your nursing career.
With nursing application season coming into full swing, I wanted to break down all of the essential tips and tricks to help you feel the most prepared to apply for nursing school. Nursing school can feel extremely daunting and overwhelming but I am here to give you first-hand experience on how to survive all the deadlines, resumes and planning necessary to create a phenomenal application that will help you take that first step to becoming a nurse.
Gain a Timeline Before Application Season
There are three big concepts to applying for nursing school including your involvement, resume and interview. All of these concepts are equally important to making your nursing application amazing and to help you stand out in a sea full of 200-plus applicants.
In my journey through applying for nursing school, the first thing I accomplished was a timeline. I met up with my Mizzou adviser to help lock in all my nursing prerequisite classes to help make sure I would be on track to apply for the fall of 2025. I then found the minimum GPA requirement, volunteer hours requirement and healthcare hours requirement to gain an understanding of how much I needed to be involved and what was necessary to add to my resume. These are all vital steps to take before preparing for the application process.
Involvement
At the University of Missouri where I applied, involvement was a huge part of your resume. I wanted to differentiate involvement and resume because involvement is so important to prepare early.
I came to college not knowing what I wanted to do but had a couple of ideas of majors that I was thinking about. I started in journalism and quickly figured out it was not the career for me. I then switched to nursing after a conversation with my mom, who said that my characteristics matched well with those of a nurse.
I started my nursing major during my spring semester of freshman year and immediately felt that I was behind in my involvement. My high school prepared me with some volunteer hours but I had zero healthcare hours which made me panic. I had about 75 hours of volunteer experience from high school, and one semester behind everyone else who had come into the University of Missouri with nursing in mind. I felt overwhelmed and that there was absolutely no way I was going to catch up to everyone else in my major before it was time to apply.
I quickly searched on the web for volunteer organizations that were different from the volunteer hours I already had. I found the Central Missouri Humane Society where I could showcase a different volunteer organization different from helping people. I volunteered at a hospice organization to gain healthcare hours outside of a traditional hospital setting. I joined clubs like Her Campus and SNA (Student Nurses Association) to show my dedication to different organizations at my university. I went through sorority recruitment to gain volunteer hours as well as being a part of a major organization on campus that showcases lots of involvement opportunities. I also got my Certified Nursing Assistant license to start working at the hospital. I would highly recommend doing this or another hospital job to start getting hands-on patient care hours which is very important to show a potential nursing school. I even added an Instagram post of me doing a workshop to help get my CNA license.
All of these are just some of the ways to prove your involvement and dedication to many different organizations at a university and outside a university. It is so important to be involved because it allows you to showcase leadership skills, teamwork skills and a commitment to helping others which are all vital skills used by nurses every day. Being involved with not only healthcare-related areas but also helping your community overall is so important.
Resume
When crafting your resume, it is very important to be involved to have anything to put on your resume but also to have a template. My university provided a template for us so I utilized that. If your school does not offer this, there are so many great templates online from many different websites.
I always made sure to place the most “important” organization, job or volunteer hours on the top to showcase first. For example, in the slot for all of my volunteer hours, I put the organization I got the most hours for and then went down in order of the most to least hours of volunteering. I did this for every slot which included healthcare experience, volunteer experience, additional experience (jobs), and activities (organizations not associated directly with volunteering). This is how I organized my resume, but follow your university template if possible and use the tips I gave you to implement in your personal template.
Another important step in your resume is the descriptions underneath each experience. These descriptions need to showcase the most important takeaways and details from that experience. For example, I described my time at the animal shelter by using three bullet points. I described what I did with my time at the animal shelter if I coordinated any events like dog adoption days and what skills I gained from that experience that I could take into nursing school. This method is one of the many great methods to follow when drafting your resume.
Overall, your resume needs to showcase you and all of your own personal skills. Resumes are not something to stress too much over and should be a place to exemplify all your great skills and experiences that will make you a great nurse.
Interview
You submitted your application with your amazing resume and now have the chance to interview, yay you! Interviewing is a chance to showcase not just all of the involvement you have done but also personal experiences that helped you gain skills that will make you a great nurse.
The best resource I used was interview prep questions from my university’s nursing application prep page. I used those questions to compile stories from healthcare experiences and even personal volunteer experiences that exemplified special skills that would help me in nursing school.
Interviewers want to see your personal skills and what makes you special, not generic answers. An example of a question I received was “What is a problem you had and how did you solve it?” I prepped this question with bullet points that I was able to recall when I was interviewed. I started with repeating the question followed by a summary of how I solve most problems. Then, I gave a detailed description of a problem I had and how I solved that problem. The last and most important way to end each question is to name all the skills you used and why those skills would make you a great nurse.
When going into your interview, you need to first take many deep breaths and be confident. Prep, prep and more prep will set you up for so much success and automatically help you with your confidence. Lastly, be yourself. They want to see who is behind all of the accomplishments and get a sense of your nature.
You Got This!
The last piece of advice I have is to remember that nursing school applications are not the end of the world. There are so many amazing nursing schools out there and you will end up where you need to be. The best thing you can do is be as prepared as possible and be confident that you have done all you can.
Remember to get involved with all different types of volunteering, maybe get a job as a CNA, job shadow or join a club. On your resume, include all your involvement from high school until you turn in your application and remember to be detailed in your descriptions. In your interview, make sure you prepare and be confident.
If you utilize these tips and tricks, you will be set up for success with all of the pointers I used to help me get accepted into the University of Missouri’s nursing school.