I'm a freshman in college with a major in nursing. I'm also taking pre med requirements so I can hopefully jump into Med school right after or perhaps with a gap year. There is this hugeeeeeee stigma against it and my nursing advisers know very little about it, and the pre health office knows pretty much nothing when it comes to nursing students.
I know it's super tough, but has anyone done nursing w/ pre med? Or went to med school after/is in med school or is a prv nurse now doctor? Any expierence you went through or if you've known someone or any insight really on it would be super helpful.
Would probably be better to do philosophy and take pre med classes. Before people call me out as a fool, philosophy majors tend to score some of the highest points on the MCAT. May not be correlated in the right direction but stats are stats.
Take a few psych classes too since the new MCAT has a lot of psych on it. If your end goal is MD, nursing is not a stepping stone to get there.
Again I'm not sure what my end goal is. I applied to nursing schools after volunteering in the ER. it didn't even cross my mind to apply to a direct MD or DO program (which looking at my scores now I should've but oh well). I mean I don't not want to be nurse and I may never want to become a doctor. But the last thing I'm going to do is lose my seat in my nursing school since it's a really god program and super competitive. What I do know is that I want to help people in an acute care setting. And if years later when I'm like 28 or something, an MD is what I want to get than I'll go for it then, but right now I'm pretty content trying to make sure I get the highest gpa possible in nursing and volunteer as much as I can.
Also the psych on the MCATS is intro level. Also the reason why history and philosophy majors do so well (I've got a brilliant friend headed to JHU and his major was history) is because they can focus on the pre med sciences rather than chemistry, etc. But it's a good plan for anyone with that kind of confidence that they'll get accepted (which at the end of the day being a cocky freshman isn't going to help when even with a perfect everything it's still not a 100% chance you'll get accepted to med school and a bio major can barely get a job at a lab).
Totally understand where you're coming from. I started college back in 2009 as pre-med biology. After a semester I though, what will I do with this degree if I don't get into med school? Realized I could get any degree, just had to take the extra pre-med classes. I ended up in Computer Science. It was something that interested me and gave me some extra time to volunteer and finish up my pre-med requirements. Fast forward, I graduated but never took my MCAT. Never felt ready enough to take it. Got a job and realized, exactly what you're talking about, I want to work with people in a healthcare setting and I don't care if I'm a doctor or something else, that's just the type of setting I think I'll enjoy working in the most.
After I year of working I quit and got into nursing school (had to take a few prereqs first). I just finished up my first semester and I love it. Nursing has taught me so much about looking at the patient as a whole, putting yourself in their shoes, solving problems in ways other than handing out meds. Its all been very interesting so far and O honestly believe nursing school is helping me be a better version of myself because you spend so much time learning how to really care for other people.
But with all of that being said, I still in the back of my mind think what about med school? There is a huge part of me that wants to be a surgeon, and I know that crazy and takes a ton of school and you have to get incredible grades, but still I feel like it'd be so cool to go after. I shadowed a surgeon one day and that was my mistake.. Ever since that's been something that I really want to do, but would have to go to medical school to do it.
SO my advice is this. I think nurses would make incredible, compassionate, extremely knowledgable doctors. I think it's important right now to think of your life as a journey and not so much where will you end up. I've spent a lot of time in school, I got out and had an awesome job, now I'm in the nursing program, and who knows what will happen next. So enjoy your years in school. If you want to be pre-med and be in nursing school, I say go for it. I think I'm going to get out and work as a nurse for a while and see how I like it. Seems like an awesome job and I'm so excited to be a nurse. And if in another couple of years I still have that nagging feeling about med school, then I'll apply. I would think DO school will line up better with nursing than pre med, and I've done a ton of research on both. I would definitely though at least try out nursing if you put in all of the time and effort to make it through the program. I'd say get out of school, after you've done all your prereqs and everything, go be a nurse and then apply to med school while you're working. That'll get you plenty of experience in a hospital and give you a better idea of exactly what role you want to play.
Hope that all made sense.. I'm typing away from my phone.
I'm in second year nursing, and met a student Dr. who was an RN before she went to med school during my clinicals. She said initially she was planning on being an NP, but then realized that it wouldn't take that much more time for her to do med school (in canada we have a 3 year med program at McMaster). She didn't decide to take the RN-->MD route until she was almost done her BScN, so didn't really have a premed background.
She worked for a year, and wrote only the verbal reasoning section on the MCAT (which is the only part required for some of the medical schools in Canada). I asked her about how it worked applying with a nursing background and she said she thought it was a really good background, because ultimately med schools are looking for well rounded students. She also said that having a nursing background gave her a really good background for her interview. Ultimately she wasn't expecting to get accepted, but did. If she hadn't she would have gone to NP school.
I don't know if my input is helpful, but I personally think that doing nursing before going through medical school is a great idea. Why? Because I did it.. or sort of did.
Ever since I was a kid, I said I was going to be a doctor, so naturally I was pre-med in college. However, I began to have doubts by my senior year (I met my then-serious-boyfriend, now husband and began to wonder what I wanted the next 10 years to look like; I worried about debt; I worried about matching... etc.). So I took a year off after graduating, and during that time began to consider nursing. Choosing between the two of them was terrible, and I dramatically cried-on-my-bedroom-floor when I eventually chose nursing. The reality was, medical school at that time was too expensive for me, and I was not prepared to commit myself to such an uncertain life-plan. The matching-system in medical school was really terrifying to me; there were specific types of medicine that I was interested in, and I wasn't kidding myself about how hard it would be to match with the things I wanted most, as they were very competitive specialties. I had always been at the top of my classes, but realistically that would also be true for many, many other amazingly bright medical students. Nursing, meanwhile, is delightful in that switching from one specialty to another is very easy; additionally, the path to nursing was less expensive and took less out of my personal life. For all of these reasons, I chose nursing. But I was terrified that I was selling-out a dream that I had had since I was a child, and I promised myself that if I wasn't happy, I would go to medical school.
Today, I work in a SICU and I am grateful EVERY SINGLE DAY that I didn't go to medical school. I have never regretted it since the first few months of my nursing career in the ICU. Don't get me wrong: I love science. I love diagnosis. I love making decisions. But you know what? I do all of those things as a SICU nurse; additionally, I am much more aware about the actual condition of my patient than the doctors because I am there for 12 hours a day and know what every part of my patient's body looks like (sometimes that's a bad thing! haha). Also, I get to spend time doing small things that, before I became a nurse, I discounted as not that important to me but today I wouldn't trade for the world. I think that other nurses on this forum will agree with me that being the one to calm a screaming patient, to cry with loved-ones, to use a warm towel to wipe the cracking lips of an intubated patient, to DO the chest compressions, to say to a patient, "I know it hurts. You can hold my hand..." -those moments are so much more precious than you can know until you have experienced them.
I love being hands-on, and the reality is that doctors are rarely hands-on. They write the orders, they review the CXRs, they are definitely incredibly essential and I wouldn't want to be in an ICU without a good attending and team -- but today, I can heartily say I wouldn't want to be one.
In short, I definitely encourage being a nurse first to make sure that being a doctor is what you really want. Definitely being a doctor is more prestigious; you will make more money, and you will come out of school with a much deeper knowledge-base (as someone who loves school, losing that knowledge-base was painful for me). But the truth is that a lot of what doctors experience is tedium (writing notes, writing basic orders, ROUNDS [ugh... rounds]), and I (like other nurses on here) have personally witnessed how terrible it is to be a resident -- 24-hour shifts, unrealistic expectations and work-loads, critical attending and ACPs, condescending nursing-staff... I always try to make friends with the residents on my unit because I often think I could have been one, and I truly think that it is one of the hardest things that a person can go through.
Think about what it is that appeals to you about being a doctor. Is it making the decisions? Is it the prestige (it's okay if it is; that's totally understandable - nursing is not prestigious and that can definitely make it seem like it is less rewarding than I personally think it is)? Is it the knowledge-base? Also, don't discount what people say about the joys of being at the bedside for 12 hours: when I used to read these forums before making my decision, I thought "Eh, I'm not a real people person, so really getting to know my patients isn't a big deal to me. All I care about is science-based medicine." Today, that is the most precious part of my job -- something I would never have expected.
If you like being in the ED, maybe you would enjoy being a nurse in a level-one trauma bay?
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Would probably be better to do philosophy and take pre med classes. Before people call me out as a fool, philosophy majors tend to score some of the highest points on the MCAT. May not be correlated in the right direction but stats are stats.
Take a few psych classes too since the new MCAT has a lot of psych on it. If your end goal is MD, nursing is not a stepping stone to get there.