Students across the university system buy and resell textbooks and other school items every semester. This mindset of buying school necessities secondhand to cut costs is something the University of North Georgia nursing students take seriously. Whether it be upcoming nursing students or graduating ones, they seek to help each other save money wherever they can.

Nursing students have an ever-changing list of things they will need throughout the program. Unfortunately, not all the necessary items can be bought and resold. Darcy Cloud, a UNG nursing 2022 graduate and current RN at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, says the access codes were her biggest expense in nursing school because they are one time use for practice questions. She says, “That’s the only thing that you can’t buy secondhand.”

Anthony Salazar, current senior studying biology at UNG Dahlonega and upcoming nursing student, says “The most expensive things were probably my books honestly I bought most of them secondhand but I couldn’t buy online codes that I needed secondhand.”

Current nursing students are aware of the expenses and try their best to help the upcoming class. Abi Jackson, a  sophomore at UNG Dahlonega and an upcoming nursing student says, “I met people that were ahead of me in classes who donated me a lot of their books.”

Since the biggest expense for nursing students is the textbook codes which cannot be resold, the nursing students created the UNG Nursing Student Marketplace Facebook page to buy and sell other items to try and cut costs.

This Facebook page sells items used by previous students and includes items like “used textbooks and scrubs, the students sell their textbooks from every semester,” says Anna Humphrey, a first-year nursing student at UNG Dahlonega.

Students tend to continue to buy secondhand items throughout their time in nursing school. Jackson says “I will definitely continue to buy secondhand due to the time and money saving aspect. I’ve already bought my blood pressure cuff and some scrubs secondhand.” Humphrey says “I’ll probably continue to buy school scrubs as needed.”

Cloud says, “People will sell their scrubs for like $5-$10 for an item on the Facebook.”

Jackson says, “It saved me a lot of time and money to get books secondhand. Time-wise because I didn’t have to search the entire internet for them if they were sold out at the books store. I saved a lot of money just because people would sell them cheap, or they were just donated.”

Humprey says “I’ll definitely try and sell at least some of the books that you don’t need the code for! That way students can get 1 or 2 books for cheap, and can still get their expensive book bundle with codes from the library!”