Hello! I am new here and I'm hoping a nurse here will be able to help me out.
Some of the questions I have are not that I am considering nursing solely for the money or that at other times I am belittling the profession. When choosing a career there are a range of issues that pop up and that must be addressed if one is going to be happy in the long run.
So, I am in pharmacy school and frankly, I'm considering a career change for many reasons. While in retail pharmacy, the opportunity is there to make a six figure salary, the work is unbelievably boring. I wanted to be a clinical pharmacist, however, my grades will not help me reach that goal. Furthermore, the workload is pretty intense and I just don't feel like having to memorize a ton of stuff. Some courses like complex dosage calculations (milimoles, E values, mEq) and medicinal chemistry, while hectic, aren't too bad if you truly understand what you are doing. I just don't like all the memorization stuff.
So I'm contemplating two career options: nursing and engineering.
As you might have guessed, I like math and physics and I could start a mechanical/aerospace possibly this fall. Issue is, I've done so much of the other science (pathophysiology, microbiology, biochemistry etc...) that I am forcing myself over the summer to review calculus in preparation for calculus 2. In short I have to take more math (time consuming) and review physics for engineers.
Nursing, I never thought about this career before. It seems to have gotten competitive, requiring many students to get top scores to matriculate. The thing is, I have no clue (beyond the usual admin meds to patients) what nurses do. I have read here that many nurses are somewhat overwhelmed when they have to help a patient "bathing in his/her urine and feces". While I have heard fear of poking someone with a needle can be overcome, having to clean someone is the least glamorous part of nursing imho. When a family member was in the hospital, in fact, we bathe him most of the time (which we proudly did given family... etc). I'm not sure, in all honesty, nurses can attest that if this is something they do many times a day, that they enjoy doing this.
How often do you have to clean a patient?
What field of nursing deal the least with that kind of stuff?
How much do nurses earn? (I know of someone who is a nurse and seems to be living very comfortably)
What makes a nurses job stressful?
Is it physical or mostly mental?
As you can see, I have lots of questions. I know some of you will say that I need to work in a hospital to really find out. I concur but there is no pause button in life. Decisions must be made sometimes given the situation. I took the Kaplan exam and did well. I submitted the application and now I will find out soon if I made the cut. But, I'm nervous.
While money is not everything, it pays to go into a career where you make enough money to live comfortably. Also, nursing seems appealing because it is a stable career while engineering is not. And also, to be honest, I had aspirations of working for NASA as a future aerospace engineer and as you can guess, friends and families surely are thinking that I may be nuts since both careers are so far apart. Please help. Give me whatever info that might make me a better nurse while enjoying the profession.
