The accelerated Bachelor’s of Science in nursing program at the ETSU Sevierville campus offers a chance for students to receive their degree in nursing within five consecutive semesters.
The ETSU Sevierville site is new to ETSU’s College of Nursing, being only three years old. It is similar in size to the Kingsport site, so it can only accommodate 30 student cohorts now.
Many students entering the program are juniors in college, but there are some students who enter the program seeking a second degree.
The program graduated its first class in May of 2020 and will be graduating its fourth class in May of 2021.
The class sizes have also been growing for each cohort.
“It took us a while to really do some good recruiting, which all of our faculty has been involved in, and speaking to high school students, speaking to community college students that might transfer in, and so that has allowed our classes to get pretty much close to 30 now, each admitting class,” said Dr. Cindy Phillips, academic director of the BSN Program for the college of nursing.
One of the advantages of the program is that students do not follow the traditional spring and fall semester schedule. Since they take classes throughout the entire year, they can finish their degree more quickly.
The Sevierville site also has a sister to Building 60 from the Veteran Affairs campus.
“We’ll have the capability eventually in the next coming months of using the Sevierville side as kind of a little sister site to building 60, so that our other, even main campus or the Kingsport site, could actually tap into Sevierville, as well as building 60, to do digital simulation and virtual simulation using our machines and our simulation equipment,” said Phillips.
The program is ever-growing and will continue to expand its class sizes and student opportunities in the years to come.
