A little bird tells me that applicants for the 2012 are getting their credit checked. What does it mean?!
First, what are we talking about here? In case you don't know about it, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has a division called the Health Resources and Services Administration, and they give out nursing scholarships. You definitely should check them out, just because they have some great scholarship and grant programs for nurses. The one for 2012 is about to be announced so it's closed at the moment, but you can certainly go over there and sign up to receive an email when the program opens back up.
Here is some further description of the program and its scholarships, right from the website:
The Nursing Scholarship Program is a selective program of the U.S. Government that helps alleviate the critical shortage of nurses currently experienced by certain types of health care facilities by helping needy students complete their nurse training. In exchange for the scholarship, upon graduation, the newly minted nurses work at these facilities for at least 2 years.
This year's award is interesting for several reasons. For one, becuase of the increased demand in healthcare for nurse practitioners, HRSA says they might give up to half of their award monies this year out to nurses pursuing graduate-level studies (which is great news if you're one of those applicants). Also interesting is the fact that some of the nurses who have already applied have been getting their credit checked and some have not. Why HRSA would want to check the credit of people who they are going to give scholarships to, we're not quite sure, but this is probably a good indicator that they have their ducks in a row and will actually award the money on time (applicants who do receive funding will be notified by August 31st).