Nursing is one of the only degreed positions where if you’re any good at it, people will question why you aren’t doing more. More, in this case, means: becoming a doctor.

These people are well-intentioned.  But between the lines, this sentiment can chip away at your job satisfaction, and make you question if you’re truly living up to your potential. 

If you’ve ever found yourself in this rabbit hole, perhaps in the midst of late-night Google deep dives searching for letters to add to your name, well—I’m going to stop you right there.  2021 is the period of time to drop the "just a nurse" mindset.

If there was ever a period of time to drop the “just a nurse” mindset, 2021 is that year.  

A lot of nurses felt that we were robbed of our “Year of the Nurse” glory in 2020. And they’re not wrong. We certainly missed out on a lot of pizza party celebrations with their paper-thin swag bags full of branded pens and water bottles and the like.  The coronavirus and its wake of devastation struck a giant red line of irony through Year of the Nurse—yet another victim in some warped version of Cancel Culture.

Or so it seemed. 

To me, there has never been a more definitive period at the end of “Nurse.” To say you worked as a nurse in 2020 is a statement unto itself. Yes, any frontline worker occupation elicits a similar feeling of admiration, sympathy, and respect, but I would argue that nurses were the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Secondary, only, to the hundreds of thousands of victims). Worked to the bone, and on the side advocating for safer working conditions, public health trust, and raising awareness for the mental health status of all healthcare workers.

This is what it means to be a nurse—you’re all in. 

We were already doing it all, and then we added more to our plate. While much of this ‘we’ve got it” was thrust upon us, I honestly think 2020 has added an important layer of validity to our profession

And if you’re just starting out? Well, down the road, these nuanced slights will become less impactful. In the meantime, I’ve got you covered if you need a little extra convincing that you’ve chosen the right profession…

5 Top reasons nursing is a unique and incomparable career:

Nurses are ‘hands-on-holistic.’ Being at the bedside, practicing nurses get a piece of the action. And unlike physicians who specialize in one area of care (often delivered via computer screen), in nursing profession, we get to take care of the entire patient—mind, body, and spirit. This kind of holistic care—and the deep connections it fosters—leads to an immense amount of job satisfaction.

Patients remember their nurses. Remember that holistic care aspect of nursing? Well, it’s kind of like this: picture a time when you were a kid, sick and in bed. Do you recall the doses of Tylenol given, or the intervals between temperature checks? Or do you more remember the warm, cozy feeling that an attentive parent played? Your patients may remember a physician’s name and perhaps a conversation or two, but nurses make or break their hospital experience.

Nurses are the healthcare jack-of-all-trades. Nurses' scope of practice take part in the planning, delivery of patient care, and follow-up of healthcare. We are constantly taking in new information and assimilating it on the fly. This takes a certain amount of anticipatory skill, intuition, and medical knowledge. But our nursing “party tricks” are the practical—yet random—skills that you pick up working in healthcare. For example, knowing how to pop open those tricky glass ampules of epi, move a patient bed laterally with the least amount of screeching bed alarm disturbance, or transfer calls between patient rooms. This is what really makes us the most indispensable medical professionals.

Nurses have way better work schedules. No mandatory on-call. ‘Nuff said.

Nursing is an opportunity springboard. Not only do you enter the workforce faster as an RN than as a doctor, but you can pick up additional specialty certifications while still working full time. Ask any nurse where they started in their career and it most likely won’t be where they are currently. This allows for nurses to try their hand at a number of different roles. You may start out as a bedside caregiver in a hospital, go on to being a school nurse, and end up working a triage phone desk for a family physician. There is literally no two nursing careers that are alike, and it is this flexibility that draws many nurses to the field. 

So, yeah. Next time you effortlessly get that IV no one else can get, or explain complicated medical diagnoses in a way your patient can actually understand, or figure out how to recalibrate that alarm that has been driving everyone mad for the past 5 hours and someone asks you why you never considered becoming a doctor…you can simply tell them this.

“I didn’t want to be just a doctor. I wanted to be a nurse, period.”