Nursing vs. Computer Science

Nurses Career Support

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Hi everyone,

I have finished my first semester at IUB as a CS major, and even though I love it because it's challenging, I can't see myself being in a computer engineer. :uhoh3: I'm taking summer school classes and got an internship that is going to start in June, but I'm having second thoughts about everything. I have not really had a good experience at this school (probably because I started in the spring and missed all the freshman stuff that most people go through), and I'm just not sure I want to stay here for 4 years. Before I came here, I also applied to Jefferson College of Health Sciences in VA and got accepted. I had a hard time choosing between CS and Nursing, and I mainly chose CS because a close relative lives close by.. which is really not a good reason. I'm trying to make a decision to either stick with it and see where it goes, or to reapply to Jefferson for the fall and make a fresh start. If I do that, I'll be forfeiting the internship.. but to be honest, I'm not that excited about it and I don't want to stay here for another 2 months just for a little cash.

I think I am motivated and excited to go through nursing school and to become an RN. I have looked at many posts on this site and am still not sure if nursing is for me. But does anyone really know? Or do nurses just pick their career and stick with it, and eventually just find things that they enjoy?

Another option is just to take the rest of the summer off, apply to Jefferson, and shadow an RN to see if it's the right fit for me. If it is, I will go, but if not, I can stay at IUB for another semester and then decide what to do. I think I'm just worried that I'll stick it out with CS and when I graduate, have no idea what to do with myself. Is it better to stick out your neck a little and hope for the best?

Thanks for reading. I would appreciate any advice :)

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I am also trying to decide if nursing is for me. I have a B.A. in another field and wish I had really thought about what I wanted to do sooner bc it's really hard and expensive trying to go back school at this point in my life. I would go ahead with your internship but I would also check the local hospitals for volunteer opportunities. Where I live, several hospitals have programs where you do nursing-type volunteer work and get an idea of what nurses do. Since it's volunteering you can do it as frequently as you would like so maybe you could just do a few hours a week, just to get an idea of what nurses do, on top of your internship. Hopefully, by the end of summer you will get a better idea of which field is for you.

There are burned out and jobless nurses out there switching to the CS field. There are also burned out and jobless CS graduates going into nursing programs. I guess my point is that both fields can be hard and competitive and i don't think either one is really harder than another, just very different. If you don't like your school but you still like CS, maybe you could just transfer somewhere else where they have a CS program? I wouldn't go into nursing just so you can switch schools. It's so hard to decide what you want to go into these days, where no field has guaranteed jobs available, good luck!

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Thanks for the advice. :) I guess after being in school and seeing what CS is really like and what job opportunities are available to grads, it doesn't appeal to me as much. I thought it was all about hacking into government agency files and leaking top secret information, haha. But in reality it just doesn't seem as rewarding as nursing. To me, fighting to save lives is much more important and worthwhile than writing software programs [not to say that technology isn't important, it's just a very different kind of problem solving!] I just don't think I would be satisfied working for a company all my life, stuck behind a computer screen. I want to be involved in something greater. :) I think I have already made my decision and need to find a way of pursuing it. I hope you are able to go back to school, even if it's only part time, and figure out what it is you want to do! The way I see it, we're going to be working the majority of our lives and if we choose something we aren't passionate about, it won't even come close to what it could be!

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If you put on your patience cap for the amount of time it would take to complete your CS degree, you would have that accomplishment to fall back on, or to try out, in the future, should you find out that nursing is not for you. People with more than one career opportunity have just that, more opportunity. Not a bad situation in today's world.

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Another possibility is to meld the two by using the computer science degree to launch you into the world of nursing informatics. The best of both worlds.

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I would rather go to school for four years, then earn some money, and go back to school if I find myself unhappy.. but being $160,000 in debt by the time I'm 26 would kill me

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Be glad you are not one of the BSN nursing students at West Coast University looking at $132,000 for their degree.

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Not worth it. Lol

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I say go for nursing. I have been in the CS field for 13 years, got into it for same reasons you describe. Challenging, but for like 8 years i have been considering moving to nursing and wishing back in college i would have thought seriously about what i wanted to do, not what would get me a good paying job the quickest. CS field is getting harder and harder for people in the US. It is a job that many people are filling overseas. I mean if you love it than it is worth going into it and getting the job, but the reasons you describe are not compelling for staying in the field.

I work in at an investment bank and I definitely do not think it is my calling, and I really believe if at all possible you should do what you think you might really feel passionate about. So I have almost convinced myself to go for it, (in my case it would be a big pay cut), but your post really stood out to me, because the field never occured to me until I had been working several years, though I have been helping people forever.

Good Luck,

Stacy

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Thanks for your post Stacy. Both of my brothers are in the CS field and have been really successful.. and they are totally passionate about programming and have been doing it since they were very young. I think that's why I automatically chose it, I thought I would feel the same way about it as they did.

Anyways, I'm glad you've chosen to go with it! It's never too late to go back to school and change your career.

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I can't see you as a computer guy either, because every job I ever see in the paper says,"must have 3-5 years experience." I have a degree in accounting and I'm switching over to healthcare due to the "must have 3-5 years experience" deal. Do you have parents that own a computer company? If not, you better get into healthcare.

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There's tons of ways to get experience and apply for these positions, evne though you may not meet all of the requirements. I see webmaster/ computer software engineering positions all the time. But to land any of these you must have participated in some pretty cool internships and really know how to program. A lot of CS new grads can't find jobs because they didn't do anything to make themselves stand out. Also, imo, CS is a super hard major and unless you actually work on real software programs (ie an open source project) then you won't have an idea of how the work field will be.

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