Interest in teaching drives ACC nursing student back to school after five years

Lisa Heap dropped out of school her senior year as a biochemistry major. Five years passed before she returned to college.

Since summer of 2007, Heap has worked on her associate degree in nursing at ACC. While attending ACC, she has decided to become a nursing teacher. She credits Professor of Nursing Helen Harkreader as helping to inspire her.

"I would like to become a nursing professor and she [Harkreader] formed a lot of my ideas of what a good nursing professor looks like. Nurses can be very particular. There is a very fine line between being too strict and being too lenient. They have to be strict with us because we could hurt someone, but they have to be lenient because we are beginners and we are trying to learn."

According to the U.S. Bureau of Statistics website, registered nurses constitute the largest healthcare occupation with 2.3 million jobs. So, it is no surprise to see interest in an career that is recession proof.

Heap warns that the job might be more than students bargain for.

"What a non-nurse thinks of nursing is that they take care of sick people. Nursing really goes a lot deeper than just taking care of sick people. You also want to prevent. There is an element of seeing into the future. I will be held responsible if something happens that I should have seen coming. The thing I tell a lot of future or perspective nursing students is that no matter what you have going on in your life, nurses just have to make it work. Whether you have six kids, or a full-time job, it is always going to be something. If you can just decide to make it work, then you will find a way."

For those who do decide to become a nurse, ACC has a proven track record of success. ACC Graduate Nurses have a 98 percent chance of passing the NCLEX (National Council Licensure Examination-Registered Nurse) the first time to become a RN. That success rate is seen with students like Lisa Heap. Heap recently won the Common Knowledge Scholarship Foundation's National Nursing Scholarship.

The scholarship, which is based on the contestant's ability to correctly answer quizzes at the CKSF website, rated their answers on a point system to determine a winner. With an almost 100 percent score, Heap scored higher than students all across the United States.

"A lot of the material I covered at work …because I am a tutor, so I didn't really need to prepare for the quiz exactly," said Heap.

Heap also strongly encourages students to take advantage of tutoring here at ACC. She is a tutor for various subjects at South Austin Campus.

"I would want more students to come to the learning lab. There are not many schools that will give you free tutoring seven days a week, for almost any subjects. I just don't see anything better than that."

"I started out as a pre- med student years ago, that never went anywhere. I wanted a career where I could affect the world positevely. I didn't want to affect the world negatively, like selling bad loans. I wanted to have a job that I could be really good at. I wanted to have a positive influence on the world. All nurses teach. Whether we teach our parents about the drugs they are going home with, the morbidity of their diabetes, or how to care for their incision when they go home. I wanted to teach. And hopefully, I will teach nurses how to be nurses. I plan to go directly to UT, finish my bachelor's. I don't know if I will go for a masters or doctrates. But I'm not going to stop until I get one of those. I had five years from school, so I just don't want to stop again, I'm afraid of how long it would be before I started."