How did you know you wanted to be a nurse?

Nursing Students General Students

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I just want to hear accomplishments and roads you took to become a nurse or are taking to become a nurse?

What made you choose the profession? What was the hardest thing you had to do to get to where you are? Was there a person who made it easier or harder for you? Also, what would advice would you give to someone on their way to becoming a nurse.

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Well my story started the same way everyone else's did. Wanting to be a Pediatrician when I was about 4 years old. Obviously I didn't go through with that, nor did I really have any intention of going through with it. But there was two things that always stuck with me. I wanted to work with children and I wanted to help people. So I didn't think much about careers after that until I started applying to High school. My mom was always sick as I grew up, so I still had an interest in the medical field but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Unfortunately I didn't get into the school that had health professions and the school I went to was actually for business and technological careers.

In our high school, all students had a "major" and my major was computer science. It was actually the most interesting one IMO in the school. The rest were business, law, taxation, real estate ect. To graduate with an official business seal in our "major" we had to take 12 classes in that major so I took 12 computer science classes, which were really all computer programming classes (excel, access, java, html, c++ ect). So since I was doing all of these classes and I was doing well in them, I was considering computer programmer/IT careers. By the time I got to high school I also realized that I had a mild case of ADD so I wouldn't really enjoy a desk job and needed something that was hands on and I could move around a lot.

The computer classes and science were what I got my highest grades in. By my sophomore year one of my older sister's was entering college in the computer science field. I had gone with her to the open house where they were showing us network cards and how people made the game pong and thought "Man is this boring". My sister also changed from her computer science major after just a year. Then in my junior year, I took a cisco networking class, which was considered a real computer science class where you connect routers to computers and ethernet cables and I sucked, our whole class actually sucked lol. And I realized. "Oh no I can't do this either!".

So we were just beginning the college process, they were handing out flyers for colleges and we even took a trip to a college campus. By this time I had narrowed down my choices between nursing (because a lot of the schools had it), teaching (because I liked the idea of being a Kindergarten teacher) and social work (helping kids). I quickly ruled out social work and I wasn't so sure if I wanted to be a teacher, so I began looking into schools that had nursing programs.

I applied to 5 schools and got into 4 of them for pre-nursing. I had decided that I would take the private university because it was the school I always wanted to go to. I had accepted, paid the deposit, taken the placement exam and registered for classes. All was fine until I got sticker shock from the tuition and changed my mind at the last minute and went to a 4 year public college. When I first decided to do nursing I was not aware of how tough programs were to get into. It was never discussed in high school and I always heard about med school. It wasn't until the middle of my first semester in college when me and a couple of my classmates had heard how difficult nursing programs were, including our school's program. They immediately chickened out and changed their majors in that first semester. I was willing to stick it out. After a year of less than stellar grades and realizing the cut throat competition at the school and the fact that I was a little disappointed with the school in general, I decided to transfer. First I considered going to a community college and getting my ADN but then decided I didn't want to go that route and ironically ended at in the school that I was first going to attend but got sticker shock from.

At this point, I knew how difficult nursing programs were so I was seriously considering my options and the school I was transferring to had numerous other health profession majors. So at this point I was considering Nursing, Speech-language Pathology, Physician Assistant, Pharmacy and Occupational Therapy. I did research on all of them and realized that Nursing was personally the best fit for me and what I wanted to do, I liked the fact that there was room to always change within the field and I liked their amount of responsibility, it was just right for me.

So two more years of pre-reqs later and I'm finally starting the nursing program come Fall. I'm completely dedicated to it and can't wait to start. The only issue I'm having now of course is the price of tuition. It wasn't so bad the first two years but it keeps going up every year and the school charges per credit/hours. In nursing you take more credits 16-18 most semesters so it cost more than when I was taking 14 credits for the past two years.

My family said they always knew I'd end up in the healthcare field, and the "I can see you as a nurse" comment from most of my friends in high school which is strange because both my sisters are doing business and my dad does IT none of my HS friends are even doing a health related profession with the exception of three people (one doing nursing, one doing vet and the other doing Pharmacy). 2/3 of the rest of my HS friends are doing something business related and it's funny because when I talk to them about doing clinicals and nursing classes they always say "Man I wish I was doing that!". Haha didn't think this post would be this long! Oops =D

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Specializes in Telemetry.

Hmmmm.

I didn't know any nurses while growing up. I didn't have a "nurse aunt" or whatever. My uneducated idea of the profession is really more of what a nursing assistant is - I thought it was mainly unskilled work. In high school I decided that I wanted to be a high school health teacher, as I felt a real passion for health care and for education... but then I started to feel unsatisfied with how narrow the idea seemed to be. One of my coworkers at a job I had in my 2nd year of college was married to a nurse, and she was always talking about her husband's job and how awesome it was, and all of the stories he would tell her. I started to get really fascinated with it and realized that I really didn't know a thing about nursing. I went to the local library and checked out like ten books about nursing and obsessively read them, and then I was hooked. I researched nursing programs and started my prerequisites.. that was about 2 1/2 years ago, and now I will be starting the nursing program in September! I am so excited and the passion that I feel for it makes me so confident that this is the right path for me.

Prerequisites weren't easy, as I was working full-time and going to school full-time.. but my husband and family have been really supportive. I assume that the most challenging parts are still to come :)

For advice.... prerequisites are important. They are the foundation of what you will learn in nursing school. You won't be successful in nursing school if you skate through A&P, cram for tests and then forget all the knowledge right afterward. You need to learn the stuff, or else you will just have to learn it later. Don't take the classes with the main goal of getting an A - make it your main goal to truly learn the material.

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Specializes in Critical Care; Cardiac; Professional Development.

I have always been drawn to the medical field and always wanted to be a nurse, but was fearful of the schooling required and didn't think I was smart enough. So I worked in medical offices and wished for a better life.

Fast forward to the last seven years. I have three boys and two of them have been diagnosed with different kinds of cancer. My youngest had a brain tumor and is doing well, but needs a large amount of medication to function as a "normal" child. He was 5 when diagnosed and is 12 now. After that, my oldest son was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. We ran the whole gammut from diagnosis to remission to relapse. Ultimately he had a bone marrow transplant and passed away at the age of 13 from complications. That was three years ago.

He had wound up on a ventilator in PICU and I got very close to the nurses caring for him there. We are still friends to this day and they kept telling me what a wonderful nurse I would make. When we were told there was no longer any hope of survival off of the oscillator, we had to make the agonizing decision to turn off the machines and let Joseph go. We each had our turn to say goodbye to him, and in the struggle of doing that, I found myself reviewing all he had been through, all the courage he'd shown for things he was afraid of, all the ways he struggled, suffered and fought. And I thought of all the dreams he would never GET to pursue now....and it just hit me. I had no excuse for avoiding being a nurse because I was afraid of working hard or not being smart enough. It was MY dream. So I promised him in that moment of saying goodbye that I would go to nursing school, that I would become a nurse and that I would remember him and what we went through together and use it to be a better person.

He died in January. I started my pre-requisites in May. I applied and was accepted on my first try, and doing this has been the most healing thing I could have done for myself. I will graduate nursing school the same year he would have graduated from high school. He would be turning 17 on May 26th.

And that's my story.

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I was always interested in science and medicine, but unfortunately when I was in high school there weren't any adults around me who were astute enough to pick up on it and guide me the right way. My parents were babyboomers who were still of the "old-school" idea that you MUST go to a 4-year college, you can major in whatever you want, because that college degree will get you a nice middle-class job behind a desk doing something and you'll earn a good living and live happily ever after. So that's what I did - went to a liberal arts college majored in English because it seemed easy (I hate to read fiction, write papers, etc) and ended up working in Human Resources for various companies, usually in the financial realm, and HATING it. Finally, after I was laid off from my 6th job in 8 years, I came to the realization that I could do something better with my life if I was only brave enough to make a chance. I wanted to help people hands on, I wanted a REAL skill, I wanted to be challenged, I wanted to be in science/medicine, and for some reason I could just envision myself as a nurse, that this occupation would fit with who I am. So here I am, 31 years old, just finished my first year of nursing school and will graduate in May 2011. I'm loving every minute of it, excited for my summer externship; I can't see myself doing anything else but nursing at this point and my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner.

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If we're being honest...

...I saw 1 episode of ER and said to myself "I think I'll do that for a living."

I ended up becoming a CNA and am attending nursing school instead of medical school, though.

I LOVE IT.

All I can say is thank God I ended up liking the field the way it is in REAL LIFE. Can't tell you how disappointed I was when not every person that came through the doors got a thoracotomy.

PS It's not a good idea to base your career decisions solely on TV programs. I just happened to luck out. :)

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I have always been drawn to the medical field and always wanted to be a nurse, but was fearful of the schooling required and didn't think I was smart enough. So I worked in medical offices and wished for a better life.

Fast forward to the last seven years. I have three boys and two of them have been diagnosed with different kinds of cancer. My youngest had a brain tumor and is doing well, but needs a large amount of medication to function as a "normal" child. He was 5 when diagnosed and is 12 now. After that, my oldest son was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. We ran the whole gammut from diagnosis to remission to relapse. Ultimately he had a bone marrow transplant and passed away at the age of 13 from complications. That was three years ago.

He had wound up on a ventilator in PICU and I got very close to the nurses caring for him there. We are still friends to this day and they kept telling me what a wonderful nurse I would make. When we were told there was no longer any hope of survival off of the oscillator, we had to make the agonizing decision to turn off the machines and let Joseph go. We each had our turn to say goodbye to him, and in the struggle of doing that, I found myself reviewing all he had been through, all the courage he'd shown for things he was afraid of, all the ways he struggled, suffered and fought. And I thought of all the dreams he would never GET to pursue now....and it just hit me. I had no excuse for avoiding being a nurse because I was afraid of working hard or not being smart enough. It was MY dream. So I promised him in that moment of saying goodbye that I would go to nursing school, that I would become a nurse and that I would remember him and what we went through together and use it to be a better person.

He died in January. I started my pre-requisites in May. I applied and was accepted on my first try, and doing this has been the most healing thing I could have done for myself. I will graduate nursing school the same year he would have graduated from high school. He would be turning 17 on May 26th.

And that's my story.

This made me cry. You are very strong and would definitely be someone to look up to. You will be a great nurse!

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If we're being honest...

...I saw 1 episode of ER and said to myself "I think I'll do that for a living."

I ended up becoming a CNA and am attending nursing school instead of medical school, though.

I LOVE IT.

All I can say is thank God I ended up liking the field the way it is in REAL LIFE. Can't tell you how disappointed I was when not every person that came through the doors got a thoracotomy.

PS It's not a good idea to base your career decisions solely on TV programs. I just happened to luck out. :)

Good thing it's something you're good at and liked because school is expensive and would've been a bad let down if u spent all that money and went through all the training. Good Job though!

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Well my story started the same way everyone else's did. Wanting to be a Pediatrician when I was about 4 years old. Obviously I didn't go through with that, nor did I really have any intention of going through with it. But there was two things that always stuck with me. I wanted to work with children and I wanted to help people. So I didn't think much about careers after that until I started applying to High school. My mom was always sick as I grew up, so I still had an interest in the medical field but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Unfortunately I didn't get into the school that had health professions and the school I went to was actually for business and technological careers.

In our high school, all students had a "major" and my major was computer science. It was actually the most interesting one IMO in the school. The rest were business, law, taxation, real estate ect. To graduate with an official business seal in our "major" we had to take 12 classes in that major so I took 12 computer science classes, which were really all computer programming classes (excel, access, java, html, c++ ect). So since I was doing all of these classes and I was doing well in them, I was considering computer programmer/IT careers. By the time I got to high school I also realized that I had a mild case of ADD so I wouldn't really enjoy a desk job and needed something that was hands on and I could move around a lot.

The computer classes and science were what I got my highest grades in. By my sophomore year one of my older sister's was entering college in the computer science field. I had gone with her to the open house where they were showing us network cards and how people made the game pong and thought "Man is this boring". My sister also changed from her computer science major after just a year. Then in my junior year, I took a cisco networking class, which was considered a real computer science class where you connect routers to computers and ethernet cables and I sucked, our whole class actually sucked lol. And I realized. "Oh no I can't do this either!".

So we were just beginning the college process, they were handing out flyers for colleges and we even took a trip to a college campus. By this time I had narrowed down my choices between nursing (because a lot of the schools had it), teaching (because I liked the idea of being a Kindergarten teacher) and social work (helping kids). I quickly ruled out social work and I wasn't so sure if I wanted to be a teacher, so I began looking into schools that had nursing programs.

I applied to 5 schools and got into 4 of them for pre-nursing. I had decided that I would take the private university because it was the school I always wanted to go to. I had accepted, paid the deposit, taken the placement exam and registered for classes. All was fine until I got sticker shock from the tuition and changed my mind at the last minute and went to a 4 year public college. When I first decided to do nursing I was not aware of how tough programs were to get into. It was never discussed in high school and I always heard about med school. It wasn't until the middle of my first semester in college when me and a couple of my classmates had heard how difficult nursing programs were, including our school's program. They immediately chickened out and changed their majors in that first semester. I was willing to stick it out. After a year of less than stellar grades and realizing the cut throat competition at the school and the fact that I was a little disappointed with the school in general, I decided to transfer. First I considered going to a community college and getting my ADN but then decided I didn't want to go that route and ironically ended at in the school that I was first going to attend but got sticker shock from.

At this point, I knew how difficult nursing programs were so I was seriously considering my options and the school I was transferring to had numerous other health profession majors. So at this point I was considering Nursing, Speech-language Pathology, Physician Assistant, Pharmacy and Occupational Therapy. I did research on all of them and realized that Nursing was personally the best fit for me and what I wanted to do, I liked the fact that there was room to always change within the field and I liked their amount of responsibility, it was just right for me.

So two more years of pre-reqs later and I'm finally starting the nursing program come Fall. I'm completely dedicated to it and can't wait to start. The only issue I'm having now of course is the price of tuition. It wasn't so bad the first two years but it keeps going up every year and the school charges per credit/hours. In nursing you take more credits 16-18 most semesters so it cost more than when I was taking 14 credits for the past two years.

My family said they always knew I'd end up in the healthcare field, and the "I can see you as a nurse" comment from most of my friends in high school which is strange because both my sisters are doing business and my dad does IT none of my HS friends are even doing a health related profession with the exception of three people (one doing nursing, one doing vet and the other doing Pharmacy). 2/3 of the rest of my HS friends are doing something business related and it's funny because when I talk to them about doing clinicals and nursing classes they always say "Man I wish I was doing that!". Haha didn't think this post would be this long! Oops =D

My family always called me a little doctor. :D I just think I wouldn't ever go as far as being a doctor, maybe a physician assistant, but I don't know if I could handle going to school for 10-14 years or longer!

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If we're being honest...

...I saw 1 episode of ER and said to myself "I think I'll do that for a living."

I ended up becoming a CNA and am attending nursing school instead of medical school, though.

I LOVE IT.

All I can say is thank God I ended up liking the field the way it is in REAL LIFE. Can't tell you how disappointed I was when not every person that came through the doors got a thoracotomy.

PS It's not a good idea to base your career decisions solely on TV programs. I just happened to luck out. :)

HAHA! I laughed so hard when I read the beginning. It kind of reminds me of myself except with greys anatomy. I do realize that it won't be the same but I can't lie that that was my inspiration. I'm kind of scared of the question "Why do you want to be a nurse" because I know it's not the heart-wrenching story so many nurses seem to have and it wasn't one of those things where I knew my whole life either. I didn't even like science in high school. But now I'm pretty obsessed with it. :yeah:

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