Meet Lindsey Pawlowski and Hear How Courses at GBCC Helped Open the Door to a Required Degree and New Career
Lindsey Pawlowski didn’t earn a degree at Great Bay Community College, nor does she plan to. But the half-dozen classes she took at Great Bay beginning in fall 2023 were critical to her acceptance in the University of New Hampshire’s Direct Entry Nursing Master’s degree program.
“I went to Great Bay for a year, and I achieved the outcome I was hoping to achieve,” said Pawlowski, who lives in Kingston. “I needed to take some prerequisite courses to apply to nursing school, and I was able to do that at Great Bay. I found that Great Bay had an affordable cost per-credit-hour, and I heard great things about the school. I decided it would be a good place to continue my educational journey.”
After successfully completing the necessary courses, she applied to the UNH program and recently learned she’s been accepted. “Great Bay gave me the opportunity to continue my education and pursue my dreams,” she said. “I am so impressed with the faculty and the staff. There are amazing professors there who are just as good as any I have had at four-year universities.”
Pawlowski worked as a tutor while a student at Great Bay, and she will continue tutoring through the end of the semester in December.
Like many non-traditional students, her path to Great Bay was long and winding. After graduating from high school, Pawlowski enrolled in the pre-vet program at Purdue University, but she quickly realized she made a mistake. She changed her major to psychology and transferred to the University of Rhode Island, where she earned her bachelor’s degree. While there, she worked in a research lab and laid the groundwork for enrolling in graduate school to continue her education.
Instead, she took a job in marketing, specializing in research related to consumer insights. She spent 12 years in the marketing and advertising industry until her instincts told her to try something new. “By the end of my career, I was focusing mostly on contracts, and I didn’t love that, per se. My gut feeling was that I wanted to be a nurse. It was something I never considered, and I wasn’t sure about the path for doing that. I didn’t have a nursing degree, and I didn’t know where to start.”
That’s when she discovered Great Bay. After doing some research and talking with friends and academic advisors at Great Bay, she learned she could take the courses she needed to apply for UNH’s Direct Entry Nursing Master’s program. UNH and Great Bay have an articulation agreement, so UNH recognized the courses she needed — human anatomy and physiology, microbiology, lifespan psychology, and statistics – to qualify for the master’s program.
The UNH direct-entry program is designed for students who want to pursue advanced-practice nursing qualifications and who do not have a prior degree in the field. Many students, like Pawlowski, have degrees in other fields.
When she finishes up at UNH, she will have a master’s and a bachelor’s, with Great Bay serving as the bridge between them.
