It’s Friday morning and Teresa Guillen, 23, nursing major, piled her books high on a round table at Starbucks and was preparing for a study group for her pediatrics class.

“It’s really important to have a study group,” Guillen said. “You should study with a group all the time and try to help each other to survive a nursing program.”

The EC nursing program started in 1962 and is one of the oldest and largest programs in California. It started as one of the first programs in the community colleges.

“It has a good reputation from hospitals in the area,” Katherine Townsend, director of nursing, said. “I am always told that ‘Nursing students of El Camino are well-prepared and we’d happy to hire them.’ ”

The nursing program also offers free programs for students, faculty and non-students. On Oct. 23 they took part in the Mobile Mammogram Project, which offered free mammogram testing.

“The response was overwhelming,” Jan Ball, coordinator of the event said. “We will definitely be doing it again soon.”

Out of 150 women that signed up, only 79 were tested due to lack of time. Ball said that next year they will try to have two days instead of one.

Once a student is accepted to this course, it takes two years to finish the program. After finishing the program, students are eligible to take the National Licensing Examination to become a registered nurse.

EC students’ overall ratio of passing the examination is 94 percent, Townsend said.

In this program, students have chances to have different practical training at the clinic each semester Townsend said.

Guillen has a class once a week at EC and goes to Harbor UCLA Medical Center twice a week. She takes care of two patients in the morning.

“I give them medications,” Guillen said. “Medications are given to them by mouth, injections or infusions.”

Students experience many different areas of the medical field such as pediatrics, obstetrics and medical and surgical rooms.

“Those experiences give me an idea of what kind of nurse I want to be,” Guillen said.

These experiences encourage students to learn important things that they cannot learn from textbooks.

“I want students to learn to treat each patient like their own family, like their own mother, father and child,” nursing instructor Monica Gross said.

Chinelo Onubah, nursing major, said she knows how important it is to treat patients with compassion and sympathy.

“When I had a miscarriage, the nurse didn’t take care of me and I was very annoyed,” Onubah said. “So I want to be a nurse to make it change.”

Gross said that it is a good time to go into the nursing field because there is a shortage of nurses and the working conditions have improved.

Gross said the working conditions became harder in California in the last 20 years because of the change in health care.

But a new bill was approved and will be enforced next year to decrease the number of patients assigned to one nurse from nine to five.

Gross said that wages have also improved dramatically.

“When I graduated in 1976, my wages as a registered nurse with a bachelor’s degree were just under eight dollars an hour,” she said. “Now a registered nurse graduating nursing school can make twenty-five dollars an hour and this is for a nurse who is only beginning.”

Gross said traveling nurses are coming from other states and countries to make up the nationwide shortage of nurses.

“A nurse’s job has flexibility in terms of being able to go into many different areas and being able to work in many different shifts,” Gross said. “You never get bored. There is always something new.”

Students interested in nursing may obtain the necessary information in the Counseling Center.

Guillen said she expects to have different experiences in the various fields that a nursing job offers.

“I want to be a nurse for an emergency room and trauma. I’m also interested in psychiatric nurse. When I get old, I want to teach nursing.”

To achieve their goal of becoming a nurse, students know there is a lot of hard work ahead of them.

They must tackle both theoretical and practical work in the program.

Guillen said they must prepare themselves to pass the national examination.

“It’s important to get organized and make sure I know what to do every day and do it,” she said. “If I don’t, it’s easy to get left behind.”