StudentPrudence

I'm exactly where you were, Orca (at the crossroads between nursing and facing the job market armed with only a BA in Psych) so I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me more about the impetus behind your decision to become a nurse. Did you have a budding interest in the direct care aspect of nursing, or the science, or was it more of a calculated decision -- you went into nursing because you wanted a wider range of career options with more room for upward mobility, or a mixture of all of the above?

I'm studying anatomy right now to prepare for my preqs next semester, and it seems like so much new -- albeit interesting -- information. Do flash cards work even when you're supposed to connect both what a part is and what it does with tangible structures that you're supposed to be able to recognize by sight, or does that method leave the latter factor wanting?

Does anyone have information about the El Paso & DFW areas?

Orca- It's still true, especially now, with the recession, ahem, "encouraging" people to enroll in grad school. As one of the more popular undergrad liberal arts majors, psych programs -- which, as you said, were already quite competitive -- are sure to see an uptick in applications. Put that together with the fact that many schools have to cut admissions to compensate for drops in both state and private funding, and the neck of the bottle gets thinner.

So, I've done quite a bit of research -- some of which involved investigating the RL experiences of nurses on this very site -- and I've made the decision to go to nursing school. I told my parents, and my father flew into a rage, talking about how his mother was a nurse and had to deal with long hours, low pay, and denigrating treatment from patients and colleagues -- she was a black nurse in the 60's south. My mother acted like I'd decided to join a rock band... she expressed her disappointment, and suggested that I should become a doctor -- preferably a "clean" one like an optometrist -- instead. I tried to explain that the money and time investment was much higher for doctors, but evidently she believes that nurses do all of the dirty work with the same knowledge while doctors do.... nothing except brief diagnoses. She thinks that I'm going into nursing because I don't believe that I'm "good enough" to be a doctor and will end up "trapped," exerting myself on the floor until I'm her age. All of this, despite the fact that my child prodigy cousin (graduated college when she was 18) went into nursing and is doing quite well for herself, and I've never expressed any desire to become a doctor. I hadn't internalized these beliefs about the profession and so I feel like I've made a good, responsible choice, but my parents, much to my surprise, do not. Has anyone else had similar experiences?

Yes, I did... until I discovered that I hated research psych and was told that I'm too introverted for clinical psych.