Before I get bogged down in reading all the comments, I just want to say: nursing is one of the most admirable and versatile professions in existence. There are very few people I’d rather have available in any generic critical situation than an experienced and competent nurse. Good on you.
I am a PhD chemist (currently post-doc); my partner is a Physics professor. He has often said that the most selfless thing we could do would be to teach high school science. It is a super important job capable of changing lives, where talented people can really shine, but at the same time can be exhausting, soul-sucking, and tedious.
I think nursing is similar in a way.
My mom is a nurse, and my two younger sisters are nurses (the youngest still finishing school). When my youngest sister decided to start nursing school (she was undecided for a long time), I thought that really, it was an extremely practical choice. Unlike many jobs, nursing is unlikely to become obsolete. Also, there are jobs everywhere, the pay is good, the work brings new challenges every day, etc, etc. It makes sense.
I guess one of the big reasons I wanted to comment (I haven’t commented on Less Wrong in two years or so), in addition to wanting to make the comparison with teaching at the high school level, is to offer a word of caution.
From my experience living in a family of nurses, I would say: “beware the administration trap.” If you are really good at your job, you will likely be offered a promotion to administration. Administration is nothing like actual nursing. You don’t deal with patients anymore—now you deal with the nurses, and generally the more incompetent ones. I think this is true of many professions—where “doing” the job and being an administrator are completely different, but it’s definitely an issue you’ll likely come up against here. Nursing, like teaching K-12, is a tough job because—even if you’re extremely bright and good at what you do—you are surrounded by co-workers who may be less bright and less good at what they do. Nursing, at least based on my impressions, is like being in high school again with a bunch of gossipy school girls or being at the neighborhood barbecue with gossipy women. It just doesn’t offer the same bubble of intellect that say, academia, would… or the same sort of environment that being in a tech company or being an entrepreneur or whatever would. So, I hope that aspect doesn’t crush your soul, and that you can take the positive parts of the profession and run with them. The thing about the medical field is that there are infinite avenues for self-improvement, and you can continue to challenge yourself and become better at your work—especially if you make sure to choose your promotions wisely and not go the administration route (assuming you don’t want that) but rather go the route of various sorts of specialization. My sister has only been nursing for 4 years or so and was kicking butt and so was quickly promoted to some sort of administrative role. She quit that within a matter of months, and has now started taking a bunch of courses to increase her skill set. My mom has been director of a nursing home, making really good money, for 8 or so years now, and it has just slowly crushed her. She finally decided she had to quit, even though her and my dad are not completely financially stable, and put in her resignation a few months ago. She has already found a position in an independent specialist/consultant type role. Even after nursing for years and being a VERY GOOD administrator—she still prefers working directly with patients.
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!)
I came here to say this, and also to say that nursing closes some doors, but it opens up others. Doctors I know often regret not becoming Nurse Practitioners, who can do almost everything doctors can do, but also get to switch fields when they want to, and get paid pretty well too.
Still, that’s about the details, and your post is about the generalizations from them. I think they’re pretty interesting generalizations, but mostly I just want to point people reading this to Study Hacks for a lot more conversation about how to achieve excellence in whatever field you end up in.
Before I get bogged down in reading all the comments, I just want to say: nursing is one of the most admirable and versatile professions in existence. There are very few people I’d rather have available in any generic critical situation than an experienced and competent nurse. Good on you.
I am a PhD chemist (currently post-doc); my partner is a Physics professor. He has often said that the most selfless thing we could do would be to teach high school science. It is a super important job capable of changing lives, where talented people can really shine, but at the same time can be exhausting, soul-sucking, and tedious.
I think nursing is similar in a way.
My mom is a nurse, and my two younger sisters are nurses (the youngest still finishing school). When my youngest sister decided to start nursing school (she was undecided for a long time), I thought that really, it was an extremely practical choice. Unlike many jobs, nursing is unlikely to become obsolete. Also, there are jobs everywhere, the pay is good, the work brings new challenges every day, etc, etc. It makes sense.
I guess one of the big reasons I wanted to comment (I haven’t commented on Less Wrong in two years or so), in addition to wanting to make the comparison with teaching at the high school level, is to offer a word of caution.
From my experience living in a family of nurses, I would say: “beware the administration trap.” If you are really good at your job, you will likely be offered a promotion to administration. Administration is nothing like actual nursing. You don’t deal with patients anymore—now you deal with the nurses, and generally the more incompetent ones. I think this is true of many professions—where “doing” the job and being an administrator are completely different, but it’s definitely an issue you’ll likely come up against here. Nursing, like teaching K-12, is a tough job because—even if you’re extremely bright and good at what you do—you are surrounded by co-workers who may be less bright and less good at what they do. Nursing, at least based on my impressions, is like being in high school again with a bunch of gossipy school girls or being at the neighborhood barbecue with gossipy women. It just doesn’t offer the same bubble of intellect that say, academia, would… or the same sort of environment that being in a tech company or being an entrepreneur or whatever would. So, I hope that aspect doesn’t crush your soul, and that you can take the positive parts of the profession and run with them. The thing about the medical field is that there are infinite avenues for self-improvement, and you can continue to challenge yourself and become better at your work—especially if you make sure to choose your promotions wisely and not go the administration route (assuming you don’t want that) but rather go the route of various sorts of specialization. My sister has only been nursing for 4 years or so and was kicking butt and so was quickly promoted to some sort of administrative role. She quit that within a matter of months, and has now started taking a bunch of courses to increase her skill set. My mom has been director of a nursing home, making really good money, for 8 or so years now, and it has just slowly crushed her. She finally decided she had to quit, even though her and my dad are not completely financially stable, and put in her resignation a few months ago. She has already found a position in an independent specialist/consultant type role. Even after nursing for years and being a VERY GOOD administrator—she still prefers working directly with patients.
An economics professor may beg to differ.
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!)
I came here to say this, and also to say that nursing closes some doors, but it opens up others. Doctors I know often regret not becoming Nurse Practitioners, who can do almost everything doctors can do, but also get to switch fields when they want to, and get paid pretty well too.
Still, that’s about the details, and your post is about the generalizations from them. I think they’re pretty interesting generalizations, but mostly I just want to point people reading this to Study Hacks for a lot more conversation about how to achieve excellence in whatever field you end up in.