The reactions I get from people when I tell them I’m in nursing tend to be either very negative or very positive. The negative ones, most often from my parents’ friends who knew me growing up, are “you’re a smart girl, why would you want to do that?”, at which point my usual defensive retort is, “So? Do you really want a dumb nurse looking after you?”
But an awful lot of people, probably more than 50%, start gushing about how much they respect me for it. As far as I can tell, being in a fancy hard degree like biomed will get you respect for brains, but studying nursing gets you points for character. People know that it’s a hard job, not hard in the sense of “only a a few really bright or talented people can do it”, but tough physically and emotionally. At work, I tell old ladies who come to aquafit classes that I’m in nursing, and they automatically think I’m a good person…
I’ll give you credit for brains. Or at least for making a very good call.
You picked a profession where the knowledge you gain is directly useful to you and the people around you. My impression is that the work is steady, positions are available everywhere, the profession shown no signs of obsolescence, and as a nurse, you’re not going to be replaced by someone younger who just came out of school learning the hot new thing that makes you obsolete.
If you say the job is really hard physically and emotionally, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. You’d know better than I do. Does everyone really know it’s so demanding?
“you’re a smart girl, why would you want to do that?”
Maybe because you’re a smart girl. Lots of people are busy chasing money and status—often the status of bossing other people around. A lot of people think that’s what smart folks do. The smarts to make good choices for your life are the smarts worth having. I’ve been an ass about a lot of the choices I’ve made, or failed to make, and all the akrasia talk around here gives me the impression I’m not alone in this.
I had no idea when I wrote that that the talk I was going to tonight would be closely related to this topic. It was a talk about the 20th century polymath Michael Polyani (physician, physicist, economist, philosopher), given by a former surgeon and teacher of surgery who’s made a late-in-life career change into teaching writing. One of the things he touched on, and which deserves a lot more thought on my part, is the relationship between reductionism and heuristics in critical decision making.
A good chunk of medicine (and I think many, but not all, aspects of nursing in particular) is about decision-making under conditions of limited information. The speaker observed that doctors coming into surgery from a hard science background tended to be less good at it, because their versions of reductionism led them into continuous loops of information gathering, trying to find more and more grains of detail. Doctors who were able to reductively eliminate information in order to converge on decisions were more talented. I asked him how this related to the current developments in medicine with respect to machine learning, robotic surgery, “AI”-driven imaging, etc. He said he didn’t have any good answers, but if he were starting his medical career again, that’s where he’d want to be.
So first, I think that the kind of intelligence required to make good decisions in an information-restricted environment is maybe not as immediately glamorous as the kind that makes the cover of Nature, but it’s just as important. Second, the ways in which different areas of knowledge are converging in medicine makes it a pretty exciting place to be for someone with your interests, and you’ve got a lot of time to explore them.
Edited to add: I suppose I should note that almost all the nurses I know are or were ER, flight, or ICU nurses, which colors my views.
Also, I looked this up on Wikipedia to confirm, and Michael Polanyi is the father of John Polanyi, who my father worked with in graduate school! (And who apparently got the Nobel Prize in chemistry!)
Thank you!
The reactions I get from people when I tell them I’m in nursing tend to be either very negative or very positive. The negative ones, most often from my parents’ friends who knew me growing up, are “you’re a smart girl, why would you want to do that?”, at which point my usual defensive retort is, “So? Do you really want a dumb nurse looking after you?”
But an awful lot of people, probably more than 50%, start gushing about how much they respect me for it. As far as I can tell, being in a fancy hard degree like biomed will get you respect for brains, but studying nursing gets you points for character. People know that it’s a hard job, not hard in the sense of “only a a few really bright or talented people can do it”, but tough physically and emotionally. At work, I tell old ladies who come to aquafit classes that I’m in nursing, and they automatically think I’m a good person…
I’ll give you credit for brains. Or at least for making a very good call.
You picked a profession where the knowledge you gain is directly useful to you and the people around you. My impression is that the work is steady, positions are available everywhere, the profession shown no signs of obsolescence, and as a nurse, you’re not going to be replaced by someone younger who just came out of school learning the hot new thing that makes you obsolete.
If you say the job is really hard physically and emotionally, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. You’d know better than I do. Does everyone really know it’s so demanding?
Maybe because you’re a smart girl. Lots of people are busy chasing money and status—often the status of bossing other people around. A lot of people think that’s what smart folks do. The smarts to make good choices for your life are the smarts worth having. I’ve been an ass about a lot of the choices I’ve made, or failed to make, and all the akrasia talk around here gives me the impression I’m not alone in this.
I had no idea when I wrote that that the talk I was going to tonight would be closely related to this topic. It was a talk about the 20th century polymath Michael Polyani (physician, physicist, economist, philosopher), given by a former surgeon and teacher of surgery who’s made a late-in-life career change into teaching writing. One of the things he touched on, and which deserves a lot more thought on my part, is the relationship between reductionism and heuristics in critical decision making.
A good chunk of medicine (and I think many, but not all, aspects of nursing in particular) is about decision-making under conditions of limited information. The speaker observed that doctors coming into surgery from a hard science background tended to be less good at it, because their versions of reductionism led them into continuous loops of information gathering, trying to find more and more grains of detail. Doctors who were able to reductively eliminate information in order to converge on decisions were more talented. I asked him how this related to the current developments in medicine with respect to machine learning, robotic surgery, “AI”-driven imaging, etc. He said he didn’t have any good answers, but if he were starting his medical career again, that’s where he’d want to be.
So first, I think that the kind of intelligence required to make good decisions in an information-restricted environment is maybe not as immediately glamorous as the kind that makes the cover of Nature, but it’s just as important. Second, the ways in which different areas of knowledge are converging in medicine makes it a pretty exciting place to be for someone with your interests, and you’ve got a lot of time to explore them.
Edited to add: I suppose I should note that almost all the nurses I know are or were ER, flight, or ICU nurses, which colors my views.
Agreed.
Also, I looked this up on Wikipedia to confirm, and Michael Polanyi is the father of John Polanyi, who my father worked with in graduate school! (And who apparently got the Nobel Prize in chemistry!)