RomaniGypsy

I have been accepted into a nursing program (RN) "provisionally" due to the track through which I had to apply, which holds my seat in the cohort I selected. My acceptance becomes complete upon my completion of A&P 1 with a grade of B or better. So, I'll be "official" in barely more than two weeks if I don't crash and burn before then. It'd take a serious screw-up on the last remaining A&P exam to drop my grade below the B range. I don't believe that I ever said that I considered nursing to be a vocation... but I don't think there needs to be this much differentiation between what is a "profession" and what is a "vocation". Either way, it's a job, where you have to have a certain amount of knowledge in order to perform your designated duties expertly, you have to dress a certain way, you have to yes-sir and no-ma'am your way through the day, etc., trading away the time you will never be able to get back (which you'd much rather be spending doing things you thoroughly enjoy) for a bunch of stupid green paper that you're told to use to buy back the freedoms and rights that our human ancestors enjoyed as birthrights but have now been appropriated into "privileges" for us. Yeah, I know, sounds pretty cynical... but I have nothing good to say about the current system. My truth is that I don't actually want to have any kind of what the modern system calls "a career". Careers are BS. Humans aren't made for "careers". Heck, I see things even on this forum where people complain about this aspect of nursing and that aspect of nursing and whatever. I put up another thread about why there is such a push to get men into nursing and one of the responses came from a male nurse, who said among other things that he left bedside nursing because he was always being used for his muscle, to lift heavy patients, and it had already screwed up his back and it was only a matter of time before he'd sustain a career-ending injury on the job if he didn't leave bedside nursing. Then I hear of nurses who have become calcified after years on the job... my cousin (an RN for at least 17 years) has talked about all of the hardships nurses face (mostly mentally)... if this "career" were really a good match for human nature, humans wouldn't suffer all of these problems on account of having this "career". I can say the same of pretty much every other "career" out there. There are only two "career fields" where people never want to retire, generally speaking - artists and clergy. (Being an artist of any type doesn't pay well, and I'm essentially an atheist.) Beyond that, it's always "how many more years do I have to suffer through this before I can finally pack it in and retire?". Nobody _wants_ that kind of mentality, no matter how much they may say that it's a necessary evil (it isn't). There is that part of me that wants to drop from the nursing program because I know I'm only doing it because it's something I'm sure I could do well, it pays well, it allows above-average flexibility, and there seems to be a demand for strong men in nursing. (I saw it myself when my wife, a delightfully large lady, had a hiatal hernia repair in 2015. They wheeled her into her room on the gurney after she came out of recovery and at the time there were no people available who were strong enough to transfer her. In essence, she had to get up herself and get into the other bed herself... after just waking up from a relatively major surgery.) I'm not doing it because this is my dream. My dream is to change the world. I see the suffering of humankind more acutely than most if not all people I've ever encountered, and not a day goes by when I'm not flooded with the feeling that I have to DO SOMETHING about that (which is, in my case anyway, accompanied by the knowledge of what actually has to be done... meaning that I know exactly what I'd do, if only I had the time and money to be able to do it instead of wasting my life making money). Yesterday I did this week's Ethics assignment, and I nearly cried reading the chapter (on Native American ethics). I have been more fired up doing this Ethics stuff than I've been with pretty much any class I've taken in recent memory. I know I'm not going to change the world as a nurse. That has nothing to do with nursing; nobody ever changes the world in the course of their "job" or "career", at least not for the better. You look at anyone who has made lasting positive changes in the _world_ (not just "in a few people's lives"), and they didn't do it as some "employee" of some establishment. Nursing would be a means to an end for me - the end being the ability to finance my dream when I wasn't fortunate enough to be born into (or marry into) money, or into a family that has any desire to give much of its available financial support to its kids / kids-in-law. That's why I really don't want to be wasting my time learning a bunch of stuff that I will never use. I'm happy to learn what I will use later on, and maybe it isn't so bad for younger people who don't have as much going on in their lives such that they can focus more time on rote-memorizing a bunch of random facts that they may just use 20 years down the road when they get unexpectedly rotated to a unit they aren't familiar with... but I already have a lot on my plate, my wife has been increasingly unable to do what she used to do to help out because all-day "morning sickness" has kicked in and probably will stick around until June (if this pregnancy goes like her first did), and then come December, one month before my scheduled start for clinical classes, I'll be a father again. My time is going to be at a serious premium if I want to be the kind of father that my kids need, and the kind of partner / helper that my wife needs. I don't think I can be blamed for not wanting to waste my precious time learning stuff I will never need to use "on the job". I don't accept the whole "well-rounded education" bit, in this context. By the time people get into nursing school, they already have a well-rounded education because they've graduated high school with good grades. (Only good grades will get you into a nursing program to begin with.) I won't argue "well-rounded education" generally, but by the time you hit college, you should already have enough of that and now it's time to specialize. Maybe I should just give my spot in the nursing program to someone else more desirous of the "career" than I am. That is still an option on the table... especially now with the second baby coming. (It took six years to get the first pregnancy. Had I known that it'd take barely more than one year to get this one, I wouldn't have signed up for any of these classes this semester. But I do like to finish what I start.) If things are only going to get harder in the clinical classes... to me that doesn't say "man, I'll probably fail"; rather, it says "man, I'll have to spend tons of time studying and doing homework in order to keep getting As, and that's time I won't have with my wife and kids when the kids will want it and the wife will need it".

That's precisely my point; if "SOME of that stuff is too deep and you'll only see it in a test, then forget it", then some of that stuff shouldn't be wasting the time or the memory resources of the students in the program. In theory at least, they should be teaching us in these classes what we need to know and what we don't. Maybe classes like A&P should be differentiated for nursing students and medical school hopefuls. After all, that's exactly what they do with stats and biology. At least at my school, they have first-year stats and "stats for health technologies", and first-year bio and "bio for health technologies". At the nursing school info session, they said that the regular first-year bio class went into more depth than "bio for health technologies", and though both classes would prepare you adequately for A&P, there was no need to take the more rigorous bio class unless you're planning on going into a more rigorous track like medical school or a degree specifically in biology. I'll talk the way I feel like talking, thank you very much. "You all" is the grammatically correct way to refer to multiple people in the second person, and it rolls off the tongue better (and is quicker to type) when said as "y'all". Everyone understands "y'all". We all have our accents and I picked up "y'all" after living for five years in Texas. You try living for five years in Texas and see if you don't come out saying "y'all". Stick to relevant suggestions from here on, okay? Honestly, I can only hope that you're right. But sometimes I don't get what these nursing programs are thinking. To give you an example, very few that I've found require Medical Terminology as part of the curriculum. Now THAT strikes me as something nurses will need to know, because they'll use it all the time. So I decided to take Med Term outside of the curriculum. I haven't felt like I won't use that on the job... and it helps that Med Term is intuitive and patterned. You learn the word parts and how to put them together, and there is a bunch of memorization but surely you need to know what all of the various conditions are and what systems they affect. I've found that Med Term goes over some of what we've learned in A&P, but not in much depth. So I think, "If Med Term doesn't require me to know all of the little details that I learn in A&P, especially when it's being taught by a professor with a DNP, it seems that that's telling me something".

So, yes indeed I agree that I got a bunch of good responses. My thing is this - I'm not going to remember all of this stuff. Who ever does? You learn it for the tests, regurgitate it as best you can, and then later on you forget it. When presented with it again at some point later on, you might remember having gone over it in the past but you still need your memory refreshed, so it's effectively like re-learning it. I do believe in learning what needs to be known for the job. But to give you an idea of what I'm talking about - I taught high school physics for a year. To do so you must have a bachelor's degree with at least a concentration in physics. I have that. To get it, I had to take classes in quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, radiation lab, numerical differential equations, etc. I remember taking two years of AP physics in high school. We _never_ did anything from any of the classes I just listed. Therefore, you literally don't need to know that stuff in order to teach whatever physics you will ever teach in high school, even if you teach the AP classes. I'm sure that you need to know a few things about anatomy and physiology. I'm not saying that that, or stats, or ethics, or psychology, etc. are useless. I just think that we're likely to encounter, let's say, less than half of what we learn. Look at what some of y'all said. "It's good to know the bones if you're on an ortho unit". Fine. But what if you're not on an ortho unit? Unless you rotate around from unit to unit for your entire career and have the most amazing photographic memory ever, a lot of the time you spent in college-level Anatomy & Physiology will have been wasted because at some point you will have to study it all again so as to refresh your memory. It strikes me that what one of the posters said would be the most logical solution - that nursing education ought to be like medical education in a sense. Meaning - people learn what every last RN in the country will _definitely_ use on the job, and the advanced stuff that is relevant to specific nursing duties that not all nurses will do, and/or specific nursing wings on which not all nurses will work, gets taught later on as additional course work for qualification to be able to work on that unit or in that specialty. After all, that's how it goes as an advanced practice RN, as I understand... you have to take certain specific education geared toward the specialty you are seeking. I haven't been blowing anything off. I'm at a straight 4.0 right now, at least if we count the 60 or so credits I have earned since having graduated from college the first time... and I didn't do badly my first time around. I just don't feel like I have a lot of free time right now, with classes and work and a toddler and a pregnant wife, and it's becoming more than a little frustrating that I'm rote-memorizing a whole bunch of stuff that I know I will forget later on and have to look up. (I'm not the only one either. Occasionally the A&P professor asks us to recall something that we had to know for a previous exam and pretty much everyone in the class, nearly all of us nursing students, are like "uhhhhhh......?". The stuff starts to blur together, the "new" stuff replaces the "old" stuff in our memories, and only the most memorable stuff from previous units sticks with us.)

I just finished taking another A&P 1 exam, and I just have to ask - do y'all really use all of this stuff on the job? Do you really need to know the difference between a tuberosity and a tubercle, or the names of all of the cranial nerves, or what muscles get innervated by what spinal nerves, or the names and locations of the individual bones in the wrist, etc, etc, etc? Or, for that matter, do you really need to know about all of the philosophers they teach you about in Ethics, or how to do a 2-way ANOVA (Statistics), or what Lev Vygotsky did with his life (Psychology)? Do y'all use _any_ of this stuff "on the job"? It strikes me that these classes are a lot like throwing a large amount of mud at a wall and hoping some will stick. I'll remember a few things from each, but I can't promise to remember which indentations are called "fossae" and which bear the name "ala". I intend no disrespect to LPNs/LVNs when I say "RNs and up", but an LPN I know said that what LPNs and RNs really need to know on account of what they do on the job is distinctly varied. Another student in my A&P 1 class said, today after the exam, that her mom is an LPN and she doesn't even know the nine abdominal regions that we learned about in the first week of class. (My takeaway is that she, and at least the other LPNs with whom she works in that facility, don't need to know even this basic A&P information in order to do their jobs successfully.) With this information in mind, I want to see if what I hear from RNs, NPs, and other "specialty nurses" is substantially different. I've worn a couple of different career hats in my life and I know that in both cases, I didn't use a lot of what I learned on the road toward being fully qualified to "do" that career. I'm still at a solid "A" in A&P 1 with only one exam to go, but part of me is disenchanted with the whole process because I feel like I'm rote-memorizing a whole bunch of stuff I will never again use after regurgitating it for the exams... and that would be naught but a waste of my time.

Oh, I know y'all do much more than that. It's just that certain other aspects of the job aren't quite so universally distasteful. Feeding people - no big deal. Pushing people around in their wheelchairs - no problem. Lifting people in and out of bed, in and out of a chair, etc - no big deal as long as you're strong enough to do it and don't have back problems. I'm not sure that everyone sees CNAs as naught but "orifice wipers"... I know I don't... it's just that that's probably the biggest aspect of the job that deters people. If the job entailed everything else a CNA does except wiping and showering, I doubt there'd be a shortage of CNAs anywhere. But... you have piqued my curiosity. Some questions: 1) In what type of facility do you work? 2) Approximately what percentage of your work time is spent cleaning up poop (off the person or off any linens, the bed, etc), showering people, and otherwise "toileting" people? (And would you say that that's about the average that any CNA working in the same type of facility could expect?) 3) What types of people don't want a female CNA? (Is it just the chauvinistic males who believe that females are inherently less competent at everything?)

I'm willing to do all of that if I must... but it is time-consuming... so I figured I'd ask people if they had any tips for me. A shortcut would be nice. But, I can move pretty much anywhere, and I'm willing to look into just about anything as long as it won't cost me a fortune or make me amass a fortune in student loans. It's more important to get in right away. We don't save much, doing what we do now. We're not tied to our current area - yeah, we own our house so to speak, but we know a guy who'd buy it and we can always sell to someone else if we must. I don't want to continue subjecting my infant son to our lifestyle of being on the road constantly. It's only a matter of time before we're involved in a catastrophic accident (we've already had several animal-collision accidents) and that's not something I want him exposed to. Frankly, I'm ready to ditch the car for a while and just ride a freaking bicycle everywhere. I used to ride my bike a lot more often than I do now. I'll do the training. It can be done in a half semester at the college where I've been taking classes. I haven't had cable since I moved out on my own... 13 years ago. I could do it part time, but it probably would be a pay cut or at least no overall pay raise.

That's the thing - I'd clean poop for $30+ per hour. (And if it's my wife, who recently developed IBS or some other nasty as-yet-undiagnosed gastrointestinal malfunction that isn't an infection, or my son who is still in diapers, I'll do it for nothing. Nobody ever likes the smell of poop, but it doesn't nauseate me. If I must, I can hold my breath or breathe through my mouth.) There is one other potential issue though. I've heard that being a male CNA makes at least some patients uneasy. For example, at one of the nursing homes where my wife and I perform music regularly, I recently discovered that a professor who had taught at my college when I was a student there is now a resident. I never had this professor but we've struck up a friendship and one of the things he told me was that he does not like being showered by a male aide. (He's not nuts about female aides either, but he said that if he must be showered by someone, he'll take a female anytime.) I've read about this being an issue at least regularly enough to warrant mention. I _can_ do all of the things a CNA would do. I just don't relish the thought of doing it regularly. Maybe that's just because the only CNAs I see with any regularity are those at nursing homes... maybe hospital CNAs don't have to clean poop and bathe people as frequently... who knows. I know that the work has to be done, and that the patients who are mentally sharp generally appreciate the work of a CNA for that reason... but I could never understand why they'd want to do the dirtiest work in the nursing home for ten bucks an hour. (Heck, even Wal-Mart nearby is advertising wages starting at $11 per hour.) Yet, as I said before... I might do it... there is somewhat of a pride issue here as well... "I have a college degree in physics, computer programming, and mathematics... I'm 38 years old... and I'm cleaning poop for ten bucks an hour." (I wouldn't have this pride issue cleaning poop for 30+ bucks an hour!)

Well, it's something anyway. Plus I have several months working as a maintenance guy / central supply guy at a nursing home. I might do that CNA course... might... I just don't get why I would have to wipe poop for ten bucks an hour in order to be a competitive candidate for nursing school. I'll wipe poop, but I'd rather do it for much more than ten bucks an hour...

Okay, so I'm rather bummed right now. I just got done with an academic counseling appointment at my local community college and they say that their RN program is full for the next three semester starts, and the earliest I could hope to get in would be Spring 2020. I'm 38 years old right now and I will be two weeks shy of 40 if I wait that long. I hate waiting. I wouldn't even be able to fill all of that time with gen-ed courses that would go toward a BSN... at most I would have two semesters of those, and with there being a summer semester, that isn't even a full calendar year. I want to do either an RN track, an accelerated BSN track for people who already have a bachelor's in a different discipline, or an accelerated MSN track for the same people. I like the idea of going to a community college because they tend to be cheaper. Something in Ohio would be best, because I could get in-state tuition. But, I'm open to anything and willing to move anywhere as long as the cost of living isn't outrageous (no NYC metro, no LA metro, none of that). I have a strong GPA and GRE, and plenty of work experience in a health care setting. Do any of y'all know any schools where a guy like me wouldn't have to wait more than a semester or so to get in, that don't cost a fortune? (I don't want huge student loans.) I could deal with a Fall 2019 start because I can go full-time with gen-eds in Spring 2019, but I don't want to wait for Spring 2020. I was hoping to start in Spring 2019. Yes, I know I will be 45 anyway, if I'm lucky, and my choice is do I want to be 45 and not a nurse or 45 and a nurse... I've heard that a lot... but I look at it like this - if I could be 45 and a DNP or 45 and an RN, due to wait lists and whatever, I would prefer to be 45 and a DNP.

Maybe there isn't as much of a "push" as I am thinking, but I have two cousins (one male, one female) who are nurses and they say, "We need more men in nursing!". My mom... "They need more male nurses!". Where there's that much smoke, there's bound to be at least some fire. Interestingly enough, my wife told me that there was a time when she, as a patient, suffered a bit due to the lack of an available male nurse. Three years ago she had a hiatal hernia repaired and she had to transfer herself from the gurney to the hospital bed because, as she said, "I overheard someone say that they couldn't move me because they didn't have a male nurse around". She's a BIG woman (hey, we all have our tastes)... that could have something to do with it. Anyway, I guess it really is a "thing". If I wind up working as a floor nurse at some point, all those years of weight lifting will finally prove to have been useful. (Maybe I'll have to get back into it... ugh...)

As a man who has considered both tracks perhaps ad nauseam, I have come up with some significant differences between the two, and some differences that don't appear to be as significant as people make them out to seem. (Of course, any of y'all of any gender can feel free to shoot down anything I'm saying here. If I'm wrong, I want to know about it for my own benefit, and to be able to benefit others thenceforth!) 1) Nursing gives you more flexibility when it comes to the possibility of "flaming out" or undergoing significant life changes. Truth be told, you have no idea where you're going to be in a few years. You may think you know... but you don't know. Stuff happens and it does a person well to be able to roll with the punches, as it were. If you go into medical school, you're looking at a bare minimum of 3 years of schooling (usually 4) and a bare minimum of 3 years of residency (up to 8, as I understand, depending upon specialty). And then when you finish, you are qualified to practice in only that one specialty. So, in essence, to go to medical school, you must have a pretty darn good idea of what you want to do with the rest of your life... when you're young... in your case, 19 years old. I'm a pretty smart egg, but at age 38 looking back, I didn't know jack squat about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life when I was 19. I thought I did... but I didn't. Changes came around, I learned more about life and people, and my life path was altered to varying degrees along the way. If you go to med school and you "flame out" along the way, you are saddled with all of that non-dischargeable medical school debt (unless you are wealthy enough to pay cash and not have to accumulate debt) and no way to get the high-paying doctor job that would afford you the ability to pay that debt down. Now, if you choose to go into nursing, there are "checkpoints" along the way depending upon how you do your education. Some programs offer you LPN training as you pursue your RN training, and you can always go for a BSN and get at least the RN license as well even if not the LPN license. You can go further and pursue an accelerated MSN or DNP, and those programs have the same checkpoints. Basically, at some point in your education, you take the NCLEX-RN and get your RN license. If you "flame out" after that point or decide that further education and training are not what you want to pursue at that time, you still have your RN license and can get a job as an RN. Let's say you do an RN - MSN program. At some point you will complete all of the requirements for a BSN, and if you want to stop the program after you reach that point, you still have your BSN and can use it to get a job. Nursing education is not the all-or-nothing proposition that medical education is. Further, medical school is, from what I have heard, an extreme workload. Maybe that's okay if you're a kid and have nothing better to do with your life, but let's say that somewhere along the way you meet a person who blows you away and you want to get married. Now we have a change in plans. Suddenly you don't want to spend 100 hours a week studying and doing school work... you want to maintain a relationship. Well, unfortunately, there is no such thing as a part-time medical education. There is also no part-time medical residency... they make you work up to 80 hours per week in residency and there are no residencies that reduce the per-week hours to 40 in exchange for being twice as long to complete. By contrast, nursing school seems largely designed around the plans and lifestyles of adults and teenagers alike. If you want to go straight into nursing school and work at it full-time like any other collegian, there are programs for that where you can get LPN certification in one year, get RN certification in two, earn a BSN in four, an MSN in six, a DNP in seven, etc. If you are working already or want to work, there are "night and weekend" LPN and RN classes. Once you get your RN, you can find programs for advanced degrees from accredited universities that are 100% online if that's your thing. Even if it isn't, you can go to nursing school, even for an advanced degree, on a part-time basis while you work (presumably as a nurse). 2) Nursing gives you more flexibility with the hours, and number of hours, that you work. I've read that most doctors work TONS of hours. I've talked with several doctors I know personally and they all say the same thing - TONS of hours. As a nurse, you aren't indentured to that if you don't want to be. People talk all the time about "three 12's per week"... that must be a common schedule. Of course, you can work much more if you want to. I have a cousin who has been a nurse for 18 years and she only works per diem when she's available... which isn't often because she's mostly a stay at home mom. She'll do a weekend day or two every now and then when her husband can stay at home with the kids. Have you ever heard of a per diem doctor? They may exist, but I haven't heard of them. 3) Nursing gives you the flexibility to change specialties if you want. When you're a doctor, you are locked into your specialty by the residency you have completed. Some doctors complete longer dual-specialty residencies but still they're locked into their specialties. That can cause many problems and disappointments, such as what is the case with my own primary care doctor. He is an internist, but in India where he was born and raised, he was a surgeon. I interviewed him once and asked him what he liked about being an internal medicine practitioner and he wasted no time saying "I don't". He went on to explain that he'd rather be a surgeon, as he is at heart an artist and he finds surgery to be art... but when he came to America, he had to take a residency that was available and all he was able to get was internal medicine. (He's in his 60s, so I don't know how things worked when he came to America... which I imagine had to have been decades ago.) If you're a doctor in America and you decide that you don't like your specialty, the only way you can change specialties is to go through another residency or equivalent fellowship for the new specialty... and that takes years... and you will get paid only resident pay. As a nurse, if you want to change specialties, it's fairly easy... all you have to do is get some training and some work experience. It's nowhere near as time-intensive as changing specialties as a doctor. Basically, if you're going to be a doctor, it strikes me that you'd better know, right now or at least somewhere in your third year of medical school, what type of doctor you will want to be for the rest of your life, no matter what. You don't have to make a decision quite that intense if you go into nursing. 4) Advanced-practice nurse pay can be pretty close to that of a doctor. (Heck, I've heard that in rare cases even an RN can make what a doctor makes by working enough hours!) If you become an advanced practice nurse like an NP or CRNA, and you work the same number of hours that a doctor works, you will probably make the same money that a doctor makes... or darn close to it. I've investigated per-hour pay for these professions and they seem to be in the same ballpark. Everyone looks at the eye-popping salaries that doctors make and they compare NP pay unfavorably to that... but from what I've read, it seems that NPs don't generally work as many hours as doctors do. They probably can... but it seems like they're not forced to do so as much as doctors are. 5) The culture of medicine is said to be much more toxic than the culture of nursing. Doctors have the highest rate of suicide of any profession. In my own observation, talking with nurses and wannabe nurses is much more pleasant than talking with doctors and wannabe doctors. In medicine there is a culture of hazing that is accepted and supported by a lot of the people, and it seems that that is nowhere near as prevalent in nursing. I read not long ago that the increased number of female medical students is having the effect of there being a movement to make medicine more human, like nursing. (Yup, that's what it said!) So there you have it. I'm no authority on the subject, but this is what I have come up with in all of the research that I've done into both paths. Choose yours wisely.

Okay, I can rock with that. I guess it would depend upon the family, but in mine, it is true that my son prefers Mommy. Apparently that's common, and from my perspective it's perfectly fine because Mommy did 98% of the work bringing him into the world. (My 2% was handling nearly all of the house work and some of our performances by myself during that time because she was either sick, restricted to "light duty" lifting, or tired.) So there's another advantage of men in nursing - their scheduling might be more reliable because they aren't as likely to call off, leave early, or need to be rescheduled on account of their kids.

I'm a man and I may not get it. AllNurses just posted an article about getting more men into nursing, there is an association for men in nursing that is trying to get more men into nursing... and I want to hear from experienced nurses about why there should be more men in nursing (if nurses really do think that there should be more men in nursing). The only good reason(s) for pushing to get more men into nursing would point to what men can do better than women, generally, in the field of nursing. If men have no advantage over women, then there is no good reason to push for more of them to go into nursing. I've never been a fan of any push to get any people of any gender, ethnicity, or race into any specific field; rather, I've always said that each person's merits and desires as they relate to the field should be the only things considered. I only see one concrete way and one possible way that men could have an advantage over women in nursing, and that is not to say that women don't have certain advantages over men in nursing - I can think of a couple of possibilities anyway. So what do I think are the advantages held by men? 1) Physical strength. This would seem to be a certainty as an advantage, given all I have read about how nurses are often tasked with moving and lifting patients. Since men are usually stronger than women, it would seem that they would be better able to do this and suffer less lasting damage as a result. 2) This one is the "maybe" - and it would be contingent upon certain patients having a preference for a male nurse over a female nurse. I doubt that happens often, but I'd also doubt that it happens never. In this case, the mere condition of being male would be the advantage. Is there more? (And/or are the two reasons I just listed not relevant?) I would claim that it has something to do with alleviating the nursing shortage, but one of the main reasons for that shortage is a lack of available spots in nursing school, which affects all genders equally... so I reject that claim for now at least.

As a man, I really don't think that anything in particular should be done to increase the number of men in nursing unless there is a better reason than "diversity" or "gender balance" for wanting to encourage more men to go into nursing. (A good reason would be something that answers the question of "What could men do easily, as nurses, that women would generally struggle to do if they could do it at all?"... I don't see many possible answers. The only one that comes to mind is "men can generally lift much heavier objects, and people, than women can". They say that nursing requires the use of physical strength from time to time, moving patients and such, and though I have known my fair share of uncommonly strong women, it is still generally true that men are physically stronger than women.) Even if there are good reasons to encourage more men to go into nursing (which I didn't find in this article), I think that the best way to incentivize men is to give them guaranteed spots in nursing school, provided that their credentials meet the school's requirements for admission. The problem, of course, would be that some qualified women wouldn't get in. But if those spots were not held for men, then some qualified men wouldn't get in... and it'd even out.

That's something that has worried me too. At the risk of irking some people of uncommonly conservative political bent, 38 years of life and 16 of those years in business for myself have shown me the evils of the "for profit" M.O., and wherever I go next, I want to be able to work in non-profit situations. I could do that as a psychologist were I a school psychologist, but I imagine that there aren't a glut of openings for school psychologists. Even at that, the starting pay is abysmally low for the education and training required - you do better as a starting RN even without overtime hours. School psychologists can travel, but their opportunities for travel jobs aren't as numerous as they are for RNs / APRNs. Sure, I could open my own counseling psychology practice if that were the route I took, but again, I'd have to be in business for myself, which would require, among other things, sales... and I HATE doing sales work, with a burning passion. Nursing seems to give a better pay-to-education ratio, with a lot of opportunity and flexibility. Plus, being a man, with many a nurse having told me that they need more men in nursing, maybe I would be able to "write my own ticket", eventually. I hope to do that for my son's sake, and increasingly for my wife's sake.