While clinical competence and hands-on ability are crucial to nursing, students in college-based nursing programs face almost certain failure if they lack skills and strategies for textbook reading. Faculty and staff at a small liberal arts college with a two-year nursing program used focus groups consisting of first-semester and final-semester students to identify 17 reading strategies used by successful students. Underprepared readers must be taught these same strategies for how to deal with the intense reading associated with undergraduate nursing, and such instruction should be mandatory and provided prior to entry into nursing coursework. Developmental reading educators are urged to partner with their colleagues in nursing to support underprepared readers who aspire to become nurses.