This interview is with Carol Lokare, RN, Nursing Education Advisor, MyNursingSchools.com.
As a Nursing Education Advisor with firsthand clinical nursing experience, what perspective do you bring to helping prospective nurses evaluate their education options?
I’ve been a nurse since 1980. That’s not a credential I list to sound impressive; it’s the foundation of everything I do at MyNursingSchools.
In my experience, most people who write about nursing education have never worked a 12-hour shift in an acute care unit. They haven’t done charge nurse rotations, spent time in a school health office, or sat with a homeless patient in a medical respite facility who hasn’t seen a doctor in years. I have. That matters when someone is trying to figure out which nursing program is worth their time and money.
Here’s what that breadth actually gives me.
When I review a program’s curriculum, I’m not reading it as an observer. I’m reading it as someone who has worked in nearly every setting a nurse can land in—from bedside care to community health to management. So when a program skips something that actually shows up in clinical work, I catch it.
My role at MyNursingSchools is to make sure what we publish is accurate, current, and practically useful—not just useful in theory, but useful on the floor.
What path led you from bedside nursing and charge-nurse responsibilities into your current work as a Nursing Education Advisor?
I started at the bedside in 1980 and, honestly, never planned to do anything else. Nursing was the job. That was it.
But careers don’t stay still, and mine certainly didn’t. Over the next four decades, I moved through acute care, progressive care, and telemetry; spent years in California doing medical/surgical nursing; took on a nurse manager role; worked in school nursing at both the elementary and high school levels; and spent time providing frontline care at a nonprofit medical respite facility for people experiencing homelessness. Through all of it, I kept coming back to the same question: Why do so many nurses arrive on the floor underprepared?
That question is what eventually pulled me toward education. I’m not moving away from clinical work — I still pull shifts as a staff and charge nurse at Abrazo Arrowhead — but I moved toward making sure the information prospective nurses rely on is actually grounded in how nursing works in the real world. That’s what my role at MyNursingSchools gives me the chance to do.
When a prospective student begins comparing nursing schools, what is the first practical step you encourage them to take to confirm a program’s accreditation?
Skip the school’s website. That’s my first, honest piece of advice to anyone comparing nursing programs.
Schools list their accreditation status on their own pages, and most of the time that information is either outdated or worded in a way that obscures what’s actually going on. From what I’ve seen over the years, prospective students take that at face value and move on. That’s a mistake.
Go directly to the accrediting body’s database instead. For nursing programs, that means ACEN or CCNE. Both organizations maintain searchable, up-to-date directories of every program they’ve accredited, and you can look up any school in about two minutes. If the program doesn’t show up, or shows up with a conditional or probationary status, that tells you something the school’s marketing page never will.
Conditional accreditation is worth paying attention to. It means the program has deficiencies the accrediting body has flagged, and those deficiencies can affect clinical training quality. That affects your NCLEX prep and whether you’re actually ready to work.
At MyNursingSchools, we cover this step specifically because it’s the kind of thing that sounds obvious but most people skip entirely.
From your experience advising future nurses, what signs show that an accredited program’s culture and expectations are a strong personal fit for a student?
Honestly, the first thing I tell prospective students is to stop relying on the admissions office to tell them if a program is a good fit. They will tell you it is. That’s their job.
If you’re seriously considering a nursing program, find a way to talk to students who are already in it. Not alumni from five years ago. Talk to current students, ideally in their second year or beyond, because they’ve seen enough of the program to give you an honest read. Ask them one specific question: what happens when a student is struggling? Not failing, just struggling. How do faculty respond?
From what I’ve seen over 45 years in this field, that answer tells you more about a program’s culture than any brochure ever will. Programs that treat struggling students as problems to manage produce nurses who are afraid to ask for help on the floor. And that’s a patient-safety issue, not just a student-experience issue.
At MyNursingSchools, we push prospective students toward this kind of direct research because the difference between a supportive program and a sink-or-swim one shows up fast once you’re in clinical rotations.
How do you help someone determine whether an ADN, BSN, accelerated BSN, or graduate nursing pathway best fits their career goals and current circumstances?
Most people approach this question backward. They pick a degree title first and then try to make their life fit around it. That’s not how I’d approach it.
The first thing I ask someone is simple: How soon do you need to be working as a nurse, and do you have financial obligations that affect how long you can be in school? Those two answers narrow the field quickly. An ADN gets you licensed and on the floor in about two years, which matters enormously if you’re supporting a family or need income sooner rather than later. A BSN takes longer but opens more doors at Magnet-designated hospitals, which increasingly list it as a hiring requirement for new grads.
Here’s another thing I’ve noticed over the years: People obsess over which degree looks best on paper without asking what the hospitals in their target market actually require. That’s a research step, not a personal preference question, and it should happen before you fill out a single application.
Graduate pathways are a separate conversation entirely. In my experience, they only make sense once someone has clinical hours under their belt and knows which specialty they’re drawn to.
What is one way applicants can use their preferred clinical environment—such as hospital, outpatient, or community care—to evaluate whether a nursing program is right for them?
Ask the program for its clinical placement list — not a general description of where students train, but the actual list of facilities, by name.
Most prospective students never do this. They read the program website, see phrases like “diverse clinical experiences,” and assume that covers what they’re after. It often doesn’t. From what I’ve seen across 45 years in this field, there’s a real gap between how programs describe their clinical partnerships and what those placements actually look like on the ground.
Here’s why this matters in practice. If you know you want to work in acute care, a program that places the majority of its students in outpatient clinics and long-term care facilities will not prepare you the same way a hospital-heavy program will. The skills you build in a med-surg unit are different from the skills you build in a community health setting. Both are legitimate, but they’re not interchangeable.
At MyNursingSchools, we cover clinical hour requirements and placement types specifically because that information rarely appears in the places students look first. Get the list, then cross-reference it against the environment you’re actually trying to work in.
For students considering online, hybrid, or campus-based nursing education, what have you seen make one delivery format more sustainable than another?
Honestly, I would push back on the idea that one format is better than another across the board. That framing is not useful.
In my experience, the students who struggle most with format are the ones who chose based on convenience rather than fit. Online sounds appealing because you set your own schedule. But nursing programs do not actually let you set your own schedule, because clinical rotations are fixed regardless of whether your didactic coursework is remote. So the flexibility people expect from online programs is often more limited than advertised.
Campus programs give you structure, face time with faculty, and in-person simulation labs, which matter more in nursing than in most other fields because so much of what you27re learning is hands-on. Hybrid sits somewhere in between, but the inconsistency in scheduling trips people up more than they expect.
At MyNursingSchools, we cover this specifically because the format decision affects completion rates in ways prospective students do not always see coming until they are already enrolled.
Based on your experience with the realities of demanding clinical shifts, what should students ask schools about clinical placements, scheduling, and support before enrolling?
Most pre-enrollment conversations with nursing schools focus on tuition, program length, and NCLEX pass rates. Those matter. But they’re not what determines whether you actually get through clinical rotations in one piece.
Based on my years in acute care, the thing that breaks students isn’t the coursework. It’s the collision between their outside life and a clinical schedule they had no say in building. Before you sign anything, ask the program three things:
- How far in advance do students receive their clinical schedules? A week’s notice for a 12-hour hospital shift is not enough time to arrange childcare or adjust a work schedule.
- Do students have any input into placement sites, and if so, how much?
- What academic support exists specifically for students during clinical rotations, not just during didactic coursework?
Programs that have good answers to all three have usually thought seriously about what their students are managing outside the classroom. Programs that fumble those questions, or redirect you back to the brochure, probably haven’t.
What is one decision a prospective nursing student can make before applying that will better prepare them to succeed in both nursing school and early practice?
Here’s something I don’t think gets said enough. Nursing school doesn’t teach you how to be comfortable with human suffering; it teaches you clinical skills. Those are two different things, and you need both.
Before you apply anywhere, spend time around patients. Not as an observer, but as someone doing the work. Roles such as a CNA position, a patient transport position, or consistent volunteering in a care setting give you something no program can give you in a classroom: a realistic picture of what nursing actually asks of you on a human level. I started at the bedside in 1980, and the nurses I’ve seen struggle most in early practice weren’t the ones who lacked technical knowledge. They were the ones who had never sat with a patient who was dying, managed a confused, elderly patient at 3 a.m., or held it together in front of a family while internally processing something hard.
That exposure before nursing school doesn’t make those moments easy, but it means they’re not also a surprise. Ask yourself after a few weeks in that environment whether you still want to do this. If the answer is yes, you’re ready to apply. If it’s not, you just saved yourself two years and a significant amount of money.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
If you’re still unsure whether you’re cut out for nursing, I’d say this.
That uncertainty is normal. I’ve never met a nurse who walked into their first shift completely confident. The ones who last aren’t the ones who had no doubts. They’re the ones who showed up anyway.
There’s a difference, though, between nerves and a genuine mismatch. Nerves are about performance. A mismatch runs deeper than that. It shows up as dread, not just before hard shifts, but before ordinary ones. If you notice that feeling early and consistently, it’s worth paying attention to before you’re two years into a program.
From what I’ve seen over 45 years, the people who build lasting careers in this profession share one thing. They actually want to be in the room with patients—not the idea of it, not the salary, job security, or the respect that comes with the title. The actual work of caring for someone when they’re at their most vulnerable.
If that’s genuinely you, nursing will give you a career worth having.