Any RNs considering medical school?

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Hello nurses! I just want to reach out as a new member to ask about RNs who have considered studying medicine. I am in my last year of nursing school and am finding nursing school to be incredibly boring and not stimulating at all. All day long I am measuring and recording vital signs, while I wish I was studying more biology and chemistry. I like the time I get with patients, and I love to make them happy.. but I just feel like this is too easy. I could have slept through every semester of nursing school because it was all too easy and it didn't really require as much critical thought as I thought it would for me. I am going to take a tour at a local medical school after clinicals today because I wish I was diagnosing, researching, and truly treating patients instead of executing orders and running to physicians every time there is a problem that is out of my scope of practice! I just want to know if there anyone else who has felt this way, or if there are any nurses that are in medical school that felt this way. I feel totally alone at school when it comes to the feeling I have towards this because everyone around me is constantly talking about how hard everything is.. I have had to study somewhat.. but besides the detail oriented things, when it comes to nursing exams, clinicals, care plans ... it is all so easy I could sleep through it. Even though I feel relaxed, the nursing faculty is constantly stressing out, and trying to tell us how stressed we are going to be ... it seems like they are trying to push stress only us for things that are practically thoughtless and common sense to myself... does anyone else feel this way? I thought of getting my masters or becoming a nurse practitioner, but I don't think I can live like this for the rest of my life. It is totally boring and I don't feel like it takes as much skill as I thought.. I think I can better serve patients as a doctor.. has anyone else thought of this and expressed their opinion in nursing school, and realized what a stigma there is surrounding nurses who want to study medicine?

Specializes in MICU, Burn ICU.

Why did you choose to go into nursing if you have completed your "pre-med" degree? BTW, there's no such thing as pre-med, but I guess that's what everyone in medicine calls prerequisites.

Nursing school isn't rocket science. I think what makes it truly hard is making sure you don't kill someone since there are people's lives directly dependent on you. The physician writes orders and does a quick "assessment" and is on their merry way. It's up to the nurse to be able to detect if things are going wrong and what to do about it appropriately.

You're only in school now. So much of what us students see isn't the entire picture because we aren't the ones actually working. Finish up your nursing degree. If you have a bachelor's that will make you ready to take the MCAT, then do that. If you're near the end and still have some classes to take, I think critical care would be good for you. NPs can dx and do orders I believe but are under an MD. The good thing is, you've realized this and it's never too late to make the switch!

There's a nurse on Youtube who dropped out of CRNA school because he too thought it wasn't as stimulating - now he's in med school loving it. There is a student in my class that makes me wonder why he's in nursing (he can be a doctor but he prefers nursing). A close friend in our program has also considered going into med school as well after this. You're not alone, but one of the rare few!

If you think you could put your brain to more use in another field, go for it. I hope people on this forum didn't make you feel down or an outsider... Good luck!!

Surely I do need to take a look inside. I am not super young, but I feel I am definitely not as mature as I could be. Maybe a bit socially impaired as well. I can own up to that and work on it.. I don't have children, and everyone I go to school with does, and I am not married eithe . So sometimes I guess I feel like the odd one out since they have all his life changing events that have better shaped them to be more socially compatable around other adults.. I think I am still selfish and a bit inconsiderate.. whereas most of the people I work with have grown out of that, and have children.. I don't know, but I am not going to beat myself up over what other people think of me either.

Specializes in ICU.
I can't tell them to send her for labs and a chest X Ray because that isn't my job..

As an ICU nurse, this is very much my job. In fact, in a lot of units, you'd put in the order for labs or an x-ray yourself based on a conditional order or protocol. As a student, it's hard to see the autonomy some nurses have, but it's there.

Anyway, if you're set on med school, you're really putting the cart before the horse- you're going to need a 510ish or higher on the MCAT and some interesting extracurricular activities, usually involving some kind of research to make your app competitive.

I don't know if you saw any of my other posts, but my major was pre-med for my first two years and I achieved a 4.0 in all of my prerequisite classes. I now have a 3.8 due to taking 19 credit hours for a semester and having to prioritize, but I established a strong background with some diverse volunteer work as well as assisting in a clinical trial. I spent years preparing for med school, and I decided that nursing was close enough for now, since I didn't have the financial means to spend another 3-5 years post bachelors in med school without additional income. I do not believe I am pushing the cart before the horse at all. I am very familiar with MCAT review, but still have 2 more semesters until I finish my bachelors degree and am able to apply. When and if I do apply, I won't be unprepared. I have belonged to the honors society in both of the two colleges I attended, and finished my associates of science with a 4.0.. I cannot say the same now, and will never have that GPA again, but I personally know a student at the same med school I want to apply to that had a 3.0 when we were in school and he is now a first year student.. so I am hoping that won't ruin my chances.. i don't know of any other extra curricular that I can do while I'm in school. But I will figure it out.

I fully understand what my patients vital signs mean in connection to their diagnosis.. so much that I would like to be the one making the diagnosis. I feel that your judgement comes from a lack of knowledge of the whole situation. I suppose the immature part about posting what I did, was not considering that many nurses may not feel this way, because if they did, they would have continued their educations. I have studied everything from pharmacology, A&P, histology, chemistry of the body, and so on since the time I was a child, and then again in college. This makes a situation where now I am in nursing school and am understanding things beyond the year of schooling I am in. I understand things the way a second year medical school student could understand and identify things. This has come from my instructors who are constantly appraising my critical thinking skills and telling me that they believe I understand the overall picture. I do not think I am smarter than others, this comes from the studying of the disease process and body systems for many years before this because I have always wanted to become a physician. I thought that there may be someone else out there who was like me in this way.. the only person that I have actually been able to connect with in a mature way about my thoughts and feelings is one of my professors who is also teaching at a medical school and practices medicine, and another doctor at a clinical site. They understand my thoughts.. I have realized that I will not gain the understanding or connect with any nurses on this level.

I am paying to get an education for things that I mostly already know and this is frustrating. Maybe I had fantastic A & P teachers, I do not know. When you speak of connecting the vitals to the diagnosis and understanding the body systems, I fully understand and that is what is so aggravating because I feel as if I am learning the same things over again- and am not going to be able to do much about the problems that these people are having since I am the one carrying out the orders and not making them. I know I will be better at helping patients if i go to medical school and become a doctor. Call me what you'd like, but it is super frustrating when one semester after another, you are given assignments and new tasks to carry out for things that are so far behind you.. you will not understand this unless you have been through it.. and tried to stick things out to realize that you have more knowledge than the career path you choose. That doesn't make me arrogant, that is going to make me a doctor. Good day.

I think you should become a doctor. It seems to be what you really want to do, so please do it. I wish you all the best and I hope you pursue and achieve what seems to be your heart's desire.

Be sure to treat nurses respectfully. They can drive you nuts if they don't like you or think you are arrogant, and you did come across as critical of nurses and our chosen profession.

If nurses think you are looking down your nose at them, they will wake you up at all hours when you are on call and dying for just a few minutes of sleep. Instead of holding non-critical calls for an hour or two at night, they will call you every 2 minutes. Then they won't help you, either. So try to make friends with the workers - not just nurses but the aides, technicians, and the housekeepers and anyone to whom you might feel superior.

So how are you going to go about achieving your MD? Apply abroad if need be, but you will be frustrated all of your life if you don't become a doctor.

Do what makes you happy.

This has been established. I agree with you that I am longing to be in a lab somewhere. I guess I just don't know what would interest me because I also enjoy the patient interactions I get. It is almost as if I would be happy in a nurse research setting. Maybe I sounded like I was outing the nursing career all together, but that is not it. It is the traditional clinical setting with the paper work and the way charting is that gets to me.. I mean if a patients chart says that they have chronic systolic & diastolic congestive heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and COPD, I think it is common sense that the patient is also at a increased risk for decreased cardiac output, and risk for gas exchange impairment.. since the physician ALREADY diagnosed them with exactly that, why do we need our own set of diagnostics that are only the side effects of what the physician already diagnosed them with. It feels like sort of a pointless task to me.. it is the simple minded tasks like this, where I am basically putting a care plan together in clinicals, basically adding things on to the exact diagnosis that was already given... and this is supposed to be my assignments and they seem pointless/easy.. then when I go listen to the patients heart I can hear that she has fluid in her lungs and a cough, which could be from the COPD- but she also had a HX of pneumonia.. and I am thinking that could be a strong indicator, but it isn't my place .. at least in clinical to point those things out. I also noticed while auscultating that she has Pericarditis or fluid around her heart which is also present with pneumonia.. I just wish I could do more because i leave and she's stuck there coughing for who knows how long.. her sputum was not totally clear and there is just nothing that I can do for her. I can't tell them to send her for labs and a chest X Ray because that isn't my job.. but she is quicker to run out of breath lately as well.. these changes are minor but I feel I could catch so many things in people before they get too bad and are more difficult to treat because I have sort of spider senses for things that are not so obvious to others.. this about me, is what makes me want to be a physician, as well as the understanding of the bodies chemical process, cells and changes, and kind of a sixth sense for it makes me believe I could do this.. but I will finish my clinicals and graduate before I figure it out for sure.

There is something you can do.

Team work makes the dream work. You notify the MD of your findings and suggest what you feel the patient needs. You have to advocate for them.

I found your reply to be very insightful and will apply this when I am in clinicals. All of the replies on this board seemed very rude and judge mental. I guess for me, it doesn't seem hard or stimulating.. the nursing program that I am in is supposed to be one of the best, but I have never been in another program to know what is better.

This is just the wrong site to bash the profession.

Anyone know how I can delete this thread? The first responses to this thread were very disrespectful, incompetent, simple minded, and down right judgemental. I no longer want to receive notifications from rude judgemental people who presumed from my post that I was somehow "smarter" than them over the internet, and choose to belittle me to make their own selfs feel more adequate.

Incompetent and simple minded? You have serious issues and no one will like or respect you with that attitude.

I think it is incompetent that after multiple suggestions to use the quote button you still don't know how to use it. Such a simple minded task too....

I can practically look at person and tell when they are about to become ill with a disease.
I do not think I will speak of this again, but just do what I think I should.

Thinking you can diagnose people just by looking at them won't go over well with Med School instructors, either. I'd keep that little gem to myself, even when (or especially when) amongst medical students and doctors.

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