I am currently a senior in high school and I am 99% sure that nursing is my calling. I am certain it is what I will do with my life.
That being said, I'm also a very bookish person with a passion for politics, history and literature. I have every intention on going to nursing school but if it's wise, I'd like to get my BA in an unrelated field first. What exactly that would be yet, I'm unsure. I will be attending community college first so I have extra time before declaring a major is necessary. But I do know it will be a field related to the topics I listed above. Likely, English or something equally as un-nursey. Or possibly something slightly related such as community health.
I could use the four years to get my pre-reqs for nursing out of the way, along with taking classes in subjects I love (it's not that I don't love science, I just happen to love everything!) then do an accelerated track for Nursing afterwards.
Part of me thinks this will help me be well rounded and maybe even make me more competitive- is this correct? Will my first BA help or hinder me with getting into nursing school/finding jobs after? Is it safer to just go straight into Nursing school? And are there any Nursing jobs with any use for outside skills such as English/culture studies?
Thank you!
**I'm very blessed with the finances aren't a worry. I understand this route could be a bit pricier.
Take the path that interests you, once you become an experienced nurse, the education path you took will not have much bearing on your level of competency. I believe it is more important for a nurse to have personality traits such as; intelligence, motivation and conscientiousness than to have taken a particular education route.
The only thing a BA in History is good for is when you want to move from putting pickles on the burger to the new position of taking pickles off of the burger that were mistakenly put there by the guy without the BA in History.
Non-nursing courses may well make you a more well-rounded person, but nope, a non-nursing BA won't do a thing for your career prospects in nursing. At best it'll let you get in to an (even more stressful than regular nursing school) Accelerated BSN or MSN program, several years later than your professional peers.
If you're sure you want to do nursing, go straight for your BSN, then kick your feet up and use your leisure time and salary when you're a working nurse to audit classes at the local university, take immersion language vacations to places you're interested in, listen to The Great Courses on your days off, take online courses in a passion subject... and go to sleep every night secure in the knowledge that you don't have an extra 20-40K in student loans hanging over your head and years of lost wages in opportunity cost behind you for a degree that ultimately held no tangible value.
Learning for learning's sake is great, but DON'T pay undergrad prices as an unemployed undergrad for the privilege and then spend the rest of your life working yourself ragged to pay it back. Get a degree that gets you the job you want, start working, and *then* embark on a your lifelong learning quest for a much more reasonable pricetag.
I would have gone straight into nursing if I knew better. Like others said, you don't have to complete the degree first before going into nursing. Minoring is always an option.
I wouldn't recommend the accelerated track, especially if you're doing things for a lib arts degree at a relatively slow pace. Just go into nursing. When you do pre-nursing, there are opportunities for volunteering so you can see if you really want to do it or not. You really don't want to go through 4 years of getting an unrelated degree and then find life ended up not so amenable to the accelerated track or suddenly money IS an issue and now things are vastly more difficult. You have no idea how much things will change in 4 years. I wish I had my mind right and had done nursing first. I just didn't know what I was getting myself into (and I didn't even intend to go into nursing, let alone set out to get an unrelated degree and then go to nursing -- it just happened that way).
Like others have said if you want to be a nurse, do nursing. Don't waste time, energy, and money on another BA. There are other ways of satisfying your other interests and believe it or not some subjects are better as electives or minors rather than majors (I speak from experience!)
I suggest getting your nursing degree first and then go back and get your second or third or even forth degree! But honestly, if money isn't an issue and you don't care about time, technically you can do whichever path first. A lot of people here will criticize your judgement on wanting to study something else first but in the end, it's your choice. There are pros and cons to everything. Yes, by pursuing a BA first, you'll be losing time and money and you might be burnt out after BUT, in doing so, you gain a world of different knowledge and you unconsciously mature in a different way which can build upon your career in the distant future as both a nurse and a human being. You still have time to decide since you're in CC but whichever you decide, remember that nothing is set in stone anyways and life can change a lot in a short amount of time!
ETA: I'm actually a second bachelor. Nursing was always something I considered before but I wasnt so sure and I knew I wasn't ready considering I was shy and basically a wall flower. So I studied a different field. Earned my degree in international relations, studied abroad, traveled a bit, luckily got lots of grants and scholarships through foreign governments, got exposed to natural disaster relief efforts and this experience actually built me up and solidified my intent on studying nursing and medicine. I hope to someday participate in international relief efforts after graduating and also teach public health abroad. Like I said, nothing is set in stone. You'll always end up where you want to be as long as you work towards it though.
OP, hopefully by now you are hearing LOUD and CLEAR the message: education is never a waste, but your current plan of thinking is very wasteful. I can't imagine a high school guidance counselor thought this was a good idea, unless he or she is clueless.
If you want to become a nurse, work toward that goal. Take additional classes where you can; you will need electives, you will have general education requirements that can engage your interest. Spending money and time spinning your wheels on classes that DON'T propel you toward you goal makes zero sense whatsoever.
Get the degree you NEED, add in the other courses of interest along the way or later. DO NOT think your current plan makes any good sense at all.
You can still take plenty of electives to indulge your love of history, english and politics while majoring in nursing or you could double major I suppose. My understanding is that once you have a BA degree you can't get grants and I'm not sure if you can get govt loans. Maybe others out there that have gone back after getting a degree can clarify this. I don't think a community health degree would be useful in getting a good paying job. We've had people with MA in public health going back for an RN in order to get the job they want!
I understand the appeal of liberal arts vs nursing with all the sciences and math, not as fun, but a liberal arts degree is basically a dead end unless you have a family or friend that can get you a good job. The rich will always have family/friends to ensure their children with liberal arts find a cushy job, but where does that leave the regular middle working class. I think that is one of the reasons so many people are going back for nursing after realizing their liberal arts degree was a waste and didn't pay off financially.
It seems also like you're buying into the idea that you should go to school to do something you love. This is a major fallacy that adults tell you. This particular idea is usually false. If you happen to be completely in love with nursing from the start, fantastic for you! You're ready to go. However, I was not completely in love with nursing (I thought I was in love with psychology and being a sex therapist but it truly was not for me -- though I was in love with medicine for practically my entire life) but I chose to go back to correct my initial error of pursuing what I "loved" (I was 17 when I graduated, HOW COULD I REASONABLY KNOW?!?!) and pursued what was practical (which got me closer to what I really loved but thought was inaccessible) and ended up falling in love with it.
You might love history and lit and stuff now, but when you get closer to graduation and the best outlook is that Starbucks job you got freshman year, it's going to end up making that lib arts degree something you deeply resent.
Don't do it. My wife has did it. She went to a prestigious Women's University got dual bachelor degrees in the arts of Sociology & Anthropology. Then her mother got sick became paralyzed and she took a job in a nursing home became a CNA to better learn how to take care of her mother at home. After many years she went back to school taking classes and got into a University to attain her BSN-RN degree. Now with 8 years of University study she went back to school and is 6 month away from being a Family Nurse Practitioner. Then their the an additional 2 years to get her Doctorate Family Nurse Practitioner. She will have over 12 years of University studies, thousands of hours of clinicals more years of studies and credit hours then any physician would have only to make S100,000.00 to $200,00.00 a year less then a physician. So if you want to go down the same road of all kinds of different non-related studies? Ok but I don't recommend it.
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dishes, BSN, RN
3,950 Posts
Take the path that interests you, once you become an experienced nurse, the education path you took will not have much bearing on your level of competency. I believe it is more important for a nurse to have personality traits such as; intelligence, motivation and conscientiousness than to have taken a particular education route.