Is Nursing a good career?

Would nursing be a good career for me?

• I am senior right now and I am signing up for classes and I am second guessing my major now. Right now it is Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. I was planning on continuing my education up to grad school for Biomedical Engineering. I just really don't want to sign on for another 8+ years of schooling anymore. I love science and I took Human anatomy last year and did really good with it. I enjoy helping people and my college has a pretty good 4 year nursing program. I have heard that there is a big demand for nurses right now but will there still be a big demand in 4-5 years when I graduate and start looking for a job?

• Answer:

  The real question is, what do you want to be doing every day for most of your adult life? Do you want to do biology research or do you want to do nursing? Either way, you can get a job in your field with just a bachelor's degree. Ifyou want a graduate degree in biochemistry, it is only two years, not four. You can go right into a Ph.D. program; you don't have to get a master's degree first. I'm not trying to talk you out of nursing. It's a great field with many career options. The demand will only increase for the next several decades, because the baby boomer population is getting old now and will need more medical/nursing care as they age. Nursing won't dry up as a career. People always get sick and injured and need nurses. There are also lots of choices about what you can do as a nurse. Once you have a couple of years of patient care experience, you can go into administration, do medical necessity reviews for health insurance companies, conduct clinical trials of new medicines for pharmaceutical companies, be the nurse expert on hospital computer projects (they need to know how nurses use the computers to chart patient information, for example), develop medical devices, etc. And of course there are many areas of patient care you can do: hospital units, emergency rooms, all the different medical specialties, operating room, rehab, etc. You could always go into a nursing program and get a bachelor's in biochem, too.