I feel almost ashamed for asking that question, partly because it’s quite impolite and inappropriate to ask a question like that (at least outside of LW) and maybe also because it might betray some kind of deeply rooted egghead-elitism on my part that I still can’t quite manage shake off, but I simply can’t resist this attempt to satisfy my raging curiosity: What’s the reason why someone as smart as you chooses to become a nurse?
Also: Do you think of your perfectionism as largely useful, largely a hindrance, or kind-of-a-mixed-bag?
Lots of reasons. The reasons why I originally chose it at age 15 aren’t all the same reasons why I keep doing it now.
At age 15:
-I wanted to get better at social skills, and nursing seemed like good practice for that.
-I wanted a steady guaranteed well-paying job after 4 years of university. Not many things promise that. Nursing does. (My hospital guaranteed me a job, in the unit that I wanted, a year before I even graduated.)
-I read number of books by Tilda Shalof about working as an ICU nurse, and my response to them was a powerful “yes, that, I want to do that.”
Now:
-It’s exciting and varied, and challenges and rewards many different parts of me. On a good day at work, I’m curious. I’m admitting a patient and we don’t quite know what’s going on yet and I stay after the end of my shift to look up their lab results because I fought to get that bloodwork (it’s really hard to do blood draws on someone who’s in severe shock) and I want to know. On a good day at work, I care. I have the same sweet old lady for a week and she’s telling me her life story and keeping me laughing as I coax and cajole her to get up in the chair an extra time, walk an extra lap around the unit, eat one more bite of hospital chicken puree. On a good day, I’m a well-oiled part in a machine much bigger than myself, a necessary and essential member of a great team, and it feels awesome. On a good day, I’m proud: of the IV I put in, the infected central line site that I noticed first, of the antibiotics I reminded the doctor to change, of the help I gave the other nurses. There are some bad days, and lots of meh days, but the work that I’m doing is always important...and in a way that my System 1 can really grasp. No productivity hacks required; I don’t need urging to work my butt off.
-I’m 22 years old and I have $50K in savings. And job security forever. That’s pretty rare.
-I have skills that are unusual within the rationality community. Nursing, like engineering, takes in random first-year undergrads and trains them to have a specified set of skills–and, in the process, to see the world in a particular way. I think like a nurse. It makes me inexplicably good at some things, like running logistics for CFAR workshops. It’s brought me up to average or above average in a lot of areas, like reacting under pressure and most types of social skills. It’s made me generically useful. And I don’t think it’s done making me more useful. I’m not even a particularly good nurse yet; you aren’t expected to be until ~5 years in.
(Perfectionism: useful overall. It might make my learning curve flatter at first, but I think I’ll keep improving for longer.)
I probably won’t do nursing forever. It’s pretty varied, but it’s not infinitely varied. Currently I’m having too much fun at work to want to leave; if I’m bored in five years, and I can find a way to legally work in the US in any capacity other than nursing, there are a bunch of interesting things I could do.
Thanks for the response, that was an interesting read.
As for perfectionism—In retrospect I think it was a huge drag on my own well-being and social relationships but helpful in getting things done. I am much less of a perfectionist nowadays and that has improved my life in many ways at the cost of making me somewhat less effective when it comes to work. Perfectionism for me wasn’t just about my work but also about myself and others—seeing the imperfections and trying to iron them out. A pattern of perception if you will that didn’t see the good things about myself and others and predominantly focused on optimizing the negatives. I feel much better now after changing that pattern of perception, so I was interested in how you thought of it—also outside of work.
Interesting. I don’t have that kind of perfectionist view about other people. At all. I guess I have high expectations for myself (including my work) but I’m also okay with being human and doing things to take care of myself.
It seems like you’re trying to ask this nicely, which is good, and I don’t know how Swimmer963 feels about this so I’m not upset on her behalf, but in general I read this sort of comment as less insulting when it doesn’t use a phrase like “someone as smart as you”.
...I don’t understand how that part is insulting. I don’t use smart as a weak form of intelligent if that’s what you mean, exactly the opposite in fact. I’m sorry maybe I’m losing some finer point of the English language as I’m not a native speaker, but I would really like you, or someone, to try to explain how that part could possibly be interpreted as insulting because I honestly don’t see it.
Edit: I’m also not implying that it’s work unworthy or anything at all, I’m honestly just genuinely curious why she chose that profession because where I’m from it’s a respected job because people know (or imagine to know) how hard the work is, but simultaneously it’s also a job that’s very much at the bottom of the food chain in terms of pay and status. I’m simply curious why she chose it.
It sort of fits an (not very common) idiomatic pattern where the compliment is empty-to-sarcastic, but it seems pretty obvious that you didn’t intend it that way, and I can’t actually think of any examples I learned the idiom from.
I get it. Makes sense, actually now that you point it out I think I’ve also seen this phrase employed as a “pseudo-compliment”. Rest assured that it wasn’t intended that way.
I’ve worked in elderly care myself a long time ago when I was around 15 years old, which I imagine is quite comparable to being a nurse but I’ve found the work to be very hard both physically and emotionally (a lot of suffering and occasionally death to deal with). In fact it inspired me to do better in school just to not have to do work this hard for what back then I envisioned being “the rest of my life”.
In Germany you either finish school with after 9, 10 or 12 (back then 13) years and you could only study at a University (without jumping through hoops) after attaining your 12⁄13 year school diploma. I was in the 10-year school type and working in elderly care was pretty much the type of work I might have to do if I left school after 10 years. My grades improved and I switched schools after 10 years and did another 3 just to “escape” hard work like that.
I like work that’s hard. The difference between us might be as simple as that. I even like work that’s physically hard. There’s something really satisfying about getting home from work and how good it feels to sit down and rest your feet, and how you know that the tiredness means you were especially useful that day.
Maybe it was, looking at that 50000€/y number solipsist quotes. In Germany you earn barely half of that before tax.
But that’s not at all the main reason why I ask to be perfectly honest. I remember Swimmer portraying herself as having some form of social anxieties so this job strikes me as a particularly counterintuitive choice.
Healthcare in the US is more expensive than in Germany, and the relative status may be different. The mean salary for US registered nurses is just over €50,000.
I feel almost ashamed for asking that question, partly because it’s quite impolite and inappropriate to ask a question like that (at least outside of LW) and maybe also because it might betray some kind of deeply rooted egghead-elitism on my part that I still can’t quite manage shake off, but I simply can’t resist this attempt to satisfy my raging curiosity: What’s the reason why someone as smart as you chooses to become a nurse?
Also: Do you think of your perfectionism as largely useful, largely a hindrance, or kind-of-a-mixed-bag?
Lots of reasons. The reasons why I originally chose it at age 15 aren’t all the same reasons why I keep doing it now.
At age 15: -I wanted to get better at social skills, and nursing seemed like good practice for that. -I wanted a steady guaranteed well-paying job after 4 years of university. Not many things promise that. Nursing does. (My hospital guaranteed me a job, in the unit that I wanted, a year before I even graduated.) -I read number of books by Tilda Shalof about working as an ICU nurse, and my response to them was a powerful “yes, that, I want to do that.”
Now: -It’s exciting and varied, and challenges and rewards many different parts of me. On a good day at work, I’m curious. I’m admitting a patient and we don’t quite know what’s going on yet and I stay after the end of my shift to look up their lab results because I fought to get that bloodwork (it’s really hard to do blood draws on someone who’s in severe shock) and I want to know. On a good day at work, I care. I have the same sweet old lady for a week and she’s telling me her life story and keeping me laughing as I coax and cajole her to get up in the chair an extra time, walk an extra lap around the unit, eat one more bite of hospital chicken puree. On a good day, I’m a well-oiled part in a machine much bigger than myself, a necessary and essential member of a great team, and it feels awesome. On a good day, I’m proud: of the IV I put in, the infected central line site that I noticed first, of the antibiotics I reminded the doctor to change, of the help I gave the other nurses. There are some bad days, and lots of meh days, but the work that I’m doing is always important...and in a way that my System 1 can really grasp. No productivity hacks required; I don’t need urging to work my butt off. -I’m 22 years old and I have $50K in savings. And job security forever. That’s pretty rare. -I have skills that are unusual within the rationality community. Nursing, like engineering, takes in random first-year undergrads and trains them to have a specified set of skills–and, in the process, to see the world in a particular way. I think like a nurse. It makes me inexplicably good at some things, like running logistics for CFAR workshops. It’s brought me up to average or above average in a lot of areas, like reacting under pressure and most types of social skills. It’s made me generically useful. And I don’t think it’s done making me more useful. I’m not even a particularly good nurse yet; you aren’t expected to be until ~5 years in.
(Perfectionism: useful overall. It might make my learning curve flatter at first, but I think I’ll keep improving for longer.)
I probably won’t do nursing forever. It’s pretty varied, but it’s not infinitely varied. Currently I’m having too much fun at work to want to leave; if I’m bored in five years, and I can find a way to legally work in the US in any capacity other than nursing, there are a bunch of interesting things I could do.
Thanks for the response, that was an interesting read.
As for perfectionism—In retrospect I think it was a huge drag on my own well-being and social relationships but helpful in getting things done. I am much less of a perfectionist nowadays and that has improved my life in many ways at the cost of making me somewhat less effective when it comes to work. Perfectionism for me wasn’t just about my work but also about myself and others—seeing the imperfections and trying to iron them out. A pattern of perception if you will that didn’t see the good things about myself and others and predominantly focused on optimizing the negatives. I feel much better now after changing that pattern of perception, so I was interested in how you thought of it—also outside of work.
Interesting. I don’t have that kind of perfectionist view about other people. At all. I guess I have high expectations for myself (including my work) but I’m also okay with being human and doing things to take care of myself.
It seems like you’re trying to ask this nicely, which is good, and I don’t know how Swimmer963 feels about this so I’m not upset on her behalf, but in general I read this sort of comment as less insulting when it doesn’t use a phrase like “someone as smart as you”.
...I don’t understand how that part is insulting. I don’t use smart as a weak form of intelligent if that’s what you mean, exactly the opposite in fact. I’m sorry maybe I’m losing some finer point of the English language as I’m not a native speaker, but I would really like you, or someone, to try to explain how that part could possibly be interpreted as insulting because I honestly don’t see it.
Edit: I’m also not implying that it’s work unworthy or anything at all, I’m honestly just genuinely curious why she chose that profession because where I’m from it’s a respected job because people know (or imagine to know) how hard the work is, but simultaneously it’s also a job that’s very much at the bottom of the food chain in terms of pay and status. I’m simply curious why she chose it.
It sort of fits an (not very common) idiomatic pattern where the compliment is empty-to-sarcastic, but it seems pretty obvious that you didn’t intend it that way, and I can’t actually think of any examples I learned the idiom from.
I get it. Makes sense, actually now that you point it out I think I’ve also seen this phrase employed as a “pseudo-compliment”. Rest assured that it wasn’t intended that way.
I figured it wasn’t.
Maybe because someone wants to?
It might fit one’s preferences better than programming, and the pay isn’t different by orders of magnitude.
Yes but the question is why do they want to? :)
I’ve worked in elderly care myself a long time ago when I was around 15 years old, which I imagine is quite comparable to being a nurse but I’ve found the work to be very hard both physically and emotionally (a lot of suffering and occasionally death to deal with). In fact it inspired me to do better in school just to not have to do work this hard for what back then I envisioned being “the rest of my life”.
In Germany you either finish school with after 9, 10 or 12 (back then 13) years and you could only study at a University (without jumping through hoops) after attaining your 12⁄13 year school diploma. I was in the 10-year school type and working in elderly care was pretty much the type of work I might have to do if I left school after 10 years. My grades improved and I switched schools after 10 years and did another 3 just to “escape” hard work like that.
I like work that’s hard. The difference between us might be as simple as that. I even like work that’s physically hard. There’s something really satisfying about getting home from work and how good it feels to sit down and rest your feet, and how you know that the tiredness means you were especially useful that day.
Well, why does anyone want to do anything? Your question implied that there one might want to “do better”, which strikes me as underinformed.
EDIT I just figured out something really interesting but am almost out of charge in the computer, will update in a bit
Maybe it was, looking at that 50000€/y number solipsist quotes. In Germany you earn barely half of that before tax.
But that’s not at all the main reason why I ask to be perfectly honest. I remember Swimmer portraying herself as having some form of social anxieties so this job strikes me as a particularly counterintuitive choice.
Healthcare in the US is more expensive than in Germany, and the relative status may be different. The mean salary for US registered nurses is just over €50,000.