What Graduate Nursing Programs Are Out There? (RN)

00:01 So, you want to go back to grad school.

00:04 Unfortunately, there are very few options for nurses when it comes to graduate degrees, so you're pretty limited.

00:10 Just kidding. There's like a million.

00:12 So I thought today we would just cover the most common ones, and the rest you will have to get out there and explore all by yourself.

00:18 You can do this. But seriously, there is a nursing degree for almost anything you could possibly dream of.

00:24 It's a little bit insane and wild, but we're here for it.

00:27 Let's start with some of the typical ones you may hear of a lot.

00:31 The first group of graduate degrees are the ones that will allow you to take a licensure test to become an advanced practice registered nurse.

00:40 These are going to be your Nurse Practitioner, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist and Certified Nurse Midwife degrees. These degrees are either an MSN or a DNP, with the intention of eventually having all of these degrees slowly being turned over to DNP's options only, but the process there is super-duper slow.

01:04 I believe CRNA's are actually the only ones that have really switched over, but the rest we're a little slow on the uptake, so not so much yet.

01:13 You can also specialize in becoming a certain type of nurse and become a leader in that specialty with a Masters of Science in Nursing.

01:22 Examples of degree focuses here are Public Health, Clinical Nurse Leader, Nurse Educator, Nursing Informatics, Nurse Administrator or Executive, Nurse Researcher, Health Quality and Patient Safety and so on and so on and so forth.

01:38 When I was researching this, I even found a lot of programs that had you pick two of those and you combine them for a super human dual masters degree.

01:47 So for those of you who end up realizing you absolutely love public health and want to eventually go back and be a leader in that space, or you realize you just want a less clinical but a more, like, math type of job, maybe informatics would be cool for you.

02:03 Go out and get your feet wet in the nursing world, and you know that wherever you want to go, there's probably an option for an advanced degree in that specialty.

02:14 And then you have the PhD and the DNP.

02:17 The doctoral degrees, which we will break down in a totally different section because it's really more confusing than it has any right to be.

02:24 Shocking! But we will see you there where we go more into those.