5 Reasons to Study Nursing at a Christian College
Strong clinical skills are essential to being a good nurse, but the best nurses also know how to build relationships, listen to patient needs, and advocate for patients and their families. Earning your nursing degree at a Christian college will help you develop all those skills and more, including the ability to care for the whole patient—mind, body and soul.
Here are five additional reasons to consider a Christian nursing program:
Knowing how to care for the whole patient will set you apart.
At a Christian college, you’ll be challenged to consider your patients’ emotional and spiritual well-being, as well as their physical symptoms. Your professors may point you toward the Bible’s countless stories of healing for direction on how to be a loving, compassionate care provider. Understanding a patient’s care beyond his or her physical needs will also set you apart when applying for nursing jobs.
Learn how to be a Christ-like advocate.
Navigating the health care system can be challenging for patients and their families, especially when they or someone they love is sick and in pain. A Christian nursing program will equip you to listen well and show compassion. It will also teach you to respectfully advocate for your patients’ needs with their doctors. You’ll learn how to bridge the gap between a patient’s concerns and medical knowledge.
As a nursing student at Northwestern College, you’ll gain 700+ hours of diverse clinical experiences, including serving at-risk populations during an off-campus, cross-cultural health experience.
Reflect on your vocation as a nurse.
If you want to become a nurse because you care about other people and want to help make their lives better, you probably already know that nursing is more than a job; it’s a calling. A Christian nursing program will help you explore and affirm that calling, deepening and strengthening it for the times when your career challenges you or breaks your heart.
At Northwestern College, freshmen headed into nursing take a course that encourages them to explore their call to nursing. As sophomores, nursing majors learn about biblical shalom—or health, wholeness and peace—within the context of nursing. This concept is re-visited in a senior nursing course to help them fully grasp their potential impact on patients and the kind of nurse they will be.
Receive personal attention and mentoring from faculty.
Because Christian colleges tend to be smaller in size, you’ll likely be part of a close-knit cohort with more opportunities for one-on-one interaction with your nursing professors. Northwestern nursing cohorts average between 25 to 30 students, while some state universities admit more than 150 students to each cohort. To give students an even more personalized learning experience, clinicals at Northwestern typically have a student-to-faculty ratio of 6:1.
Another benefit of studying nursing at Northwestern: You and your classmates will travel together to off-campus clinical sites—something most colleges don’t arrange.
Go on a medical mission and serve God’s people.
Studying nursing at a Christian college could open doors to medical mission opportunities, an excellent way to gain health care experience in environments with limited resources. Northwestern College students can serve on a medical mission in the U.S. or abroad as part of a 10-day Spring Service Partnership or 10-week Summer of Service. A partner program in Tanzania introduces students to the African country’s health services, language and culture through site visits to a hospital, an orphanage and rural HIV clinics.
The Northwestern College nursing program prepares students to be compassionate care providers who see every patient as a child of God. For the last five years, Raider nursing grads have achieved a 100% pass rate on their nursing board exams. They now serve at nationally recognized hospitals and clinics such as Duke Children’s Hospital, Mayo Clinic and Sanford Health.
