What is it like working at Tilly's?

I want to go to nursing school, but my wife wants me to go into HR. What's it like working in either field?

• One of my biggest fears is getting stuck in a career that gets boring for me. I’m very driven and ambitious. I was the first person in my family to earn a 4-year degree, worked a lot during school, finished cum laude, was the top student in my department, and am a major nerd. I need big, smart challenges. When I was an undergrad student, I was making straight As and being steered toward a career as a research professor. I got into grad schools with fellowships offered, but I ended up working in East Asia, first as a teacher, and subsequently as a textbook writer/editor. As a strong extrovert, I loved all the human interaction that came with teaching. I’ve always pictured myself working in the public sector, either in education, healthcare, or something related to public service. Though I have worked in corporate settings, I generally don’t have much in common with people whose goals are in the business world. For the past few years I’ve really wanted to go into healthcare. If I had a ton of money, I’d aim for med school. Trying to be pragmatic about being nearly 30 and having enough student loans, I’ve been looking into nursing school. I love working with people, I’m extremely interested in science, and I wanna do something that I feel like benefits people. It also offers lots of options for relocation, advancement, and additional levels of education. Ideally, I’d like to end up being a nurse practitioner. Right now, my wife is really pushing me to do a certificate in HR at a community college, and get into Human Resources. She says that there’s a co-op program, and that the whole shebang takes less than a year. She’s heard it’s a hot field, and that people make great money starting out. I feel pretty uncertain about committing to this plan, which is causing conflict. These are my reservations: I’ve had fairly mixed experiences with HR professionals in the workplace. I also imagine myself getting bored, as I don’t imagine it encompassing much intellectual challenge. Moreover, some of the HR people I’ve worked with just seem insincere, corporate, and schmoozy. They have often reminded me of salespeople, or other manipulative types. I am not excited about the idea of working with people like that, though I am aware that I may be generalizing based on limited experiences. Do other people have similar impressions of HR professionals? I see them portrayed along these lines in popular media images like the http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Evil%20Hr What have other people experienced? What's it like working in HR? What's it like working as a nurse? Which sounds like a good fit for me?

• Answer:

  I have an odd perspective on this. My mother, grandmother, maternal aunt, cousin... they're all nurses. My mother and grandmother both have PhDs in nursing and teach, my aunt practices at the MS level in hospital administration and my cousin who is about your age works as a clinical floor nurse. I've seen lots of the things nurses do.   I work in business, management, and while I've never held a formal position in HR directly, I do a ton of HR tasks, and I've been an acting hiring manager off and on over the years.   Nursing is a hugely varied field. You want fast paced, critical thinking and challenge... trauma nurses can tell you what that's like. More long term care of a smaller group of patients? Hospice care (a group of nurses for whom I have extreme respect having shadowed my mother earlier in her career when she did this type of work, very emotionally taxing.) At the NP level, you can establish your own practice. You get to take care of people directly, and make a positive impact on their lives that they will see and appreciate.   HR is a world that most people don't ever understand. You're impacted by it all the time, but you never really know how deep the snake pit is until you've walked through it for a while. HR is a good place for people who can live and breathe in a world of dots and commas. There is a tremendous body of law concerning how employers treat employees. HR are the folks who's unfortunate job it is to navigate that body of law and ensure company practices are compliant. They're also responsible for making sure that company policies are enforced corectly and consistantly, to do otherwise would be to invite all manner of discrimination law suits. You protect employees from company abuses in ways that no one will ever see. You protect the company from legal action by making sure problems can't materialize. A lot of the time, you tell people "No."  "No, you can't fire this employee for doing that, you have to write them up first," and "No, your request to transfer to our location in the bahamas based on vitamin D deficiency is not a reasonable ADA accomodation."   Both jobs have ups and downs, pros and cons. They are VERY different kinds of work. If you screw up in HR, you can ruin someone's life to one degree or another, if you screw up in nursing, someone can die. On your best days in HR, you get to do things like help someone get a job, which can be life changing to be sure. On your best days as a nurse, you save the life of someone who would have died without you. There's a lot of stuff in between the best and the worst.   My suggestion? Unless you're the kind of person who gets really excited about developing expertice in policies and legal processes, don't go into HR. There are other things in HR besides being a policy guru, like being the person who deeply understands every line item of the benefits package, or the person who gets to look at hundreds of resumes and match them to job descriptions to figure out who to interview or....   Not that nursing doesn't have it's down side... it's well paid, but at the advanced practice level, Nursing is generally paid less than comparable practice in Medicine. It's under appreciated, and it gets very hands on with some of the most disgusting things you will ever touch or smell. Some times, there is nothing to be done and people die anyway.