The Infamous Maths Degree

Elderly lady in training asked how a maths degree led to nursing.



In fact, I became a nurse (RN), a midwife (RM) and a health visitor (RHV) first.



By the time I became a health visitor, it was being noised abroad that nurses would have to have degrees. (I think this was before the days of direct entry to degree nursing.)



So I looked at the Open University as being my only feasible means of obtaining a degree. I found that, due to my previous qualifications, I needed to take only one foundation-level course. As health visiting was in many ways related to the social sciences, I decided not to take the social science foundation course and decided on maths as I had enjoyed that at school.



After that, I was hooked and continued through to a maths degree which included Mathematical Models and Methods (applied maths), 2 statistics courses, a systems course and a computing course, graduating in 1987 at the age of 46. My family were all so proud, and elder son took enormous pride in telling his fellow students that his mother had just graduated.



After that I went on to take: Statistical Methods, Graphs Networks and Design, Applications of Probability and Professional Judgement eventually graduating with first class honours in 1991 at the age of 50.



I did it all in my own time, paid for entirely by myself apart from being given study leave for a weekend revision group in my last year.



It did in fact make some sort of a difference to my career as I moved on to working with nursing information systems, mostly with training nurses to use the systems, but also with an involvement in the developing of them. People tended to ask how I liked working away from patients, but supporting nurses throught their training holds much in common. In my last post I also did some bank nursing at the weekends and, yes, it was good to get back to hands on patient care.



Apart from my career, the greatest benefit was challenging my brain...