I heard in a song once that "life is a series of serious choices." In quite a few ways this sums up why I decided to study nursing. When I started at FSU my plan was to go into MIS (Management Information Systems, i.e. computer network management). Unfortunately, I made the wrong plan, and for various reasons I ended up with a degree in Anthropology which I planned on pursuing a Masters or Doctoral degree in Ethnomusicology, which is the study of indigenous, and sometimes not so indigenous, music from around the world. Now, to me it is still a very interesting thing to study, but after graduating and working for a year and trying to figure out where I wanted to go to school I realized that I would be in school for probably another 10 years when you consider the amount of time I'd be spending in school and doing fieldwork. This seemed like a lot to do when what I really loved about music was playing it, and not necessarily playing completely traditional music for that matter. So I scrapped that idea and started thinking about what to do, again. Economics was the next in line at that point because it was a subject I was always interested in, but after seeing that what was being taught didn't exactly jive with what I thought about it, or with what kind of work I thought I'd be doing, I started to think a bit differently about school and mostly why I was going to school. Thinking economically it seemed like a huge waste of time and resources to spend more money on classes that weren't going to help me do anything productive after I had taken them, and after working in an office for a couple of years I realized sitting in front of a computer all day wasn't exactly the most exciting prospect for a life long career, even if what most people seemed to be doing was looking at facebook, wikipedia, or lolcats all day (ya rly!). I knew, in a sense, what I wanted from an occupation for a long time: something that involved thinking and physical activity, that let me feel like I had done something after working everyday, that made me feel like I was doing something good for people, that would pay me enough to not live in a cardboard box, and, especially with this whole recession thing, a job where I could actually get hired. I am also generally interested in the healthcare field, mostly because I see it as one of the biggest problems facing every industrialized country on earth. Considering the nursing shortage we hear so much about (http://www.aacn.nche.edu/media/factsheets/nursingshortage.htm) it seemed like being a nurse would be a good way to satisfy my aforementioned job criteria as well as learn something about the healthcare industry from the inside and maybe help rein in those exponentially rising healthcare costs in some extremely fractional sort of way (of course, as an armchair economist I do realize the power of aggregates). Hopefully, I'll be able to figure out why things like this: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/regional/item_SkzPo06w424s4Jf7BXzk2K happen, too.
For the specifics of what I want to do within the profession itself, well, I really don't want to say anything because, judging from the past, I'm sure it will change, but at the moment something involving surgery seems like it would interest me the most, but whether that would be a perioperative nurse or nurse anesthetist I can't really say. Working in the ICU or ER also seem like good choices for me, with the common string between all these being that I'd rather deal with something immediately life threatening rather than try to convince people that they should be eating more than eggs, red meat, potatoes, bread, and soda all day because, in my experience, it never works until they are about to get quadruple bypass surgery done, and even then it's 50-50 at best.
