-To all the nurses who chose the nursing path than the physician path...

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What things persuaded you that this was the right career for you instead of being a physician?

Specializes in ED, trauma.
I was in 8th grade. I liked the show "ER". I thought "maybe I'll be a doctor." I realized that required 8 years of school plus many years of residency. Carol Hathaway was my favorite character on ER. She was a nurse. She got to make out with George Clooney. Seemed good to me. I decided to become a nurse. 16 years later here I am.[/quote']

Hope you're not still waiting on Clooney...

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Specializes in Anesthesia, ICU, PCU.

Grade point average.

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I was premed well a chemistry major and I switched to nursing for various reasons (long story) and I have a BSN and l'll have a BS in Information Technology and I should be finished with that in April. But guess what I really want to do? Go to DO school so I'm going take the last of my prereqs starting this summer and I'll start applying for the 2016 school year.

My advice is if you want to go to medical school, major in something that will prepare you for medical school. Don't go the nursing school then the medical school route. It's two different areas of medicine. There are additional classes you have to take in order to apply to medical school. I actually work with a couple doctors who were nurses first and they said that their nursing education was invaluable but it did make things slightly harder when they were applying to medical school. But not impossible. Just harder to focus on the medical model versus the nursing model especially when taking MCAT.

But if you want to be a nurse then go to nursing school. If you want an advance nursing degree (NP, Nurse Educator, CNS, CRNA, Nurse Admin) then go that route.

I for the most part like being a nurse (not liking the bedside at all though) but my heart isn't in it and it took me a long time and money to realize it.

Why do you ask this question OP?

Sent from my iPhone using allnurses.com

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Homework question?

I had enough oppositional disorder in me that when people said, "You're so smart, you should go to medical school," I said, "People need smart nurses too." And I liked what nurses did with people better than what doctors did with people. And the idea of pulling all-nighters and working that hard in school just turned me off. I knew I didn't have it in me. Little did I know how much my profession would evolve over the next mumblemumble years. Now I have all the autonomy I want, earn better money, and still don't need to pull all-nighters. :)

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Specializes in Med-Surg, NICU.

Number one reason: I did not want to spend the best of my childbearing years in residency.

I value family more than anything. Hard to juggle work life and family when work-life consists of long hours and being on-call!

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Specializes in Pedi.
Homework question?

I had enough oppositional disorder in me that when people said, "You're so smart, you should go to medical school," I said, "People need smart nurses too." And I liked what nurses did with people better than what doctors did with people. And the idea of pulling all-nighters and working that hard in school just turned me off. I knew I didn't have it in me. Little did I know how much my profession would evolve over the next mumblemumble years. Now I have all the autonomy I want, earn better money, and still don't need to pull all-nighters. :)

I had people in high school tell me I was "too smart to be a nurse" too. Many of them were not people I really knew. A woman who worked with my Mom (who later decided that I could be a nurse and marry a doctor) and a dentist who gave a scholarship to a graduating senior from my high school each year. I applied for and won the scholarship. It was a strange scholarship- you only qualified for it if you lived in a certain section of our town, the section that was the "Italian" section a hundred years ago. Anyway, after he read my application in which I stated my intentions to attend college, major in nursing and go on to become an NP (which I no longer intend to do), he felt the need to call my Guidance Counselor and tell her to tell me that I should be a doctor. As a seventeen year old, it was quite infuriating to have all these people telling me that they knew better than I did what I should do.

Yup, being a doctor is clearly the superior choice. If I had gone to med school, I'd still have owned my own house by 27 and spent my 20s traveling the world, right? Oh, wrong. I would have been in school accruing more debt and working insane hours for almost no money.

OP, I hope you don't think that we all became nurses because we didn't think we could cut it as doctors. I never seriously considered being a doctor.

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I took a practice MCAT and fled. :no:

I wanted to work with people, not people's diagnoses. I know that is horribly superficial and simplistic, but I just feel like my skills and style of approach works better within the nurse's frame.

That doesn't rule out a bid for DNP after I get plenty of experience under my gait belt.

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Specializes in Family Nurse Practitioner.

Too long!

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Specializes in Nurse Leader specializing in Labor & Delivery.

Because I was a second-degree nurse. I didn't go into nursing until my 30s, and the idea of medical school in one's 30s just didn't even seem like an option.

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Specializes in L&D, infusion, urology.

I want to be a midwife, so that requires going the nursing route. I much prefer the midwifery approach to the OB approach.

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By the time I got my crap together I felt like I was to old to go to med school and have children. My eggs are drying up as we speak lol

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I didn't have a lot of money to afford med school...now as a nurse, im glad I'm not a doctor..too much responsibility

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