As far as it goes, you’re absolutely right. I think that’s one of the good lessons that my dad taught me, with his self-help books...it matters more (in terms of happiness, and of being good at what you do) that you like what you do all day, as opposed to enjoying the reputation of what you are.
The problem is, I think I would enjoy the day-to-day work of a doctor more than that of a nurse-there’s more thinking involved, more theory, and that’s always been the part I liked. I would almost certainly enjoy the schooling more than nursing school, too–I can’t pretend I’m not bored and underchallenged in the academic aspects of nursing. And my mother is almost certainly right that I would like many aspects of academia–the thinking and researching and studying, if not the competitive atmosphere. I used to read physics and biology books for fun, something I can never claim to have done for nursing textbooks.
Side note:
I am passionate about psychiatry and plan to be an awesome psychiatrist. I am not quite as passionate about organic medicine with its heart attacks and kidney infections, and although I work hard at it and am pretty good, some of my classmates who get up every morning super excited because they’ve dreamed of treating kidney infections their whole lives are better.
I was pretty meh about my psychiatry placement this fall. The theory is pretty fascinating, and I had some surreal conversations with patients, but in general the nurses don’t have a lot to do with theory-basically we just gave out meds, wrote notes in the chart, and then had lots of down time. I loved med-surg partly because of the lack of downtime, which didn’t give me a chance to get bored.
I’ve known at least one person (and possibly more, it’s hard to remember...) who went for a MD after years as a nurse, a couple who went on to nurse-practitioner or PA, and one or two who have shuffled between RN and EMT-P positions as pay and adventure dictate. If you spend some years as a nurse and decide later that you want more schooling, you’ll be experienced regarding the options available and probably in a more financially stable position. If you continue to yearn for academia, there are a both teaching and research avenues out there in the nursing and nurse-practitioner fields.
The versatility was a big plus for nursing when I was choosing my major… That being said, if the people cited in our textbooks are any indication of what nursing research is like, I don’t want to go there. I don’t like qualitative research in general–either it sets off my “social sciences bullshit” detector or I just can’t make any sense of it at all–and I like “nursing paradigms and conceptual models” even less. Give me a nice hard science problem to work on and I’ll be happy...
As far as it goes, you’re absolutely right. I think that’s one of the good lessons that my dad taught me, with his self-help books...it matters more (in terms of happiness, and of being good at what you do) that you like what you do all day, as opposed to enjoying the reputation of what you are.
The problem is, I think I would enjoy the day-to-day work of a doctor more than that of a nurse-there’s more thinking involved, more theory, and that’s always been the part I liked. I would almost certainly enjoy the schooling more than nursing school, too–I can’t pretend I’m not bored and underchallenged in the academic aspects of nursing. And my mother is almost certainly right that I would like many aspects of academia–the thinking and researching and studying, if not the competitive atmosphere. I used to read physics and biology books for fun, something I can never claim to have done for nursing textbooks.
Side note:
I was pretty meh about my psychiatry placement this fall. The theory is pretty fascinating, and I had some surreal conversations with patients, but in general the nurses don’t have a lot to do with theory-basically we just gave out meds, wrote notes in the chart, and then had lots of down time. I loved med-surg partly because of the lack of downtime, which didn’t give me a chance to get bored.
I’ve known at least one person (and possibly more, it’s hard to remember...) who went for a MD after years as a nurse, a couple who went on to nurse-practitioner or PA, and one or two who have shuffled between RN and EMT-P positions as pay and adventure dictate. If you spend some years as a nurse and decide later that you want more schooling, you’ll be experienced regarding the options available and probably in a more financially stable position. If you continue to yearn for academia, there are a both teaching and research avenues out there in the nursing and nurse-practitioner fields.
The versatility was a big plus for nursing when I was choosing my major… That being said, if the people cited in our textbooks are any indication of what nursing research is like, I don’t want to go there. I don’t like qualitative research in general–either it sets off my “social sciences bullshit” detector or I just can’t make any sense of it at all–and I like “nursing paradigms and conceptual models” even less. Give me a nice hard science problem to work on and I’ll be happy...