This is my thought process right now. Logically and realistically it makes way more sense to be a nurse practitioner. Takes way less time, less money, less stress to do basically the same things I would do as a psychiatrist.
But emotionally I’m unhappy with the thought of just being a nurse. I’ve always been the type who wanted to impress and be respected. (Hence my neuroscience major despite having loathed most of my undergrad academic experience) And to me being a doctor (psychiatrist) would just be more impressive than being a nurse.
I know that is a TERRIBLE reason to choose being a doctor over a nurse practitioner. First off, I have a very low chance of getting into med school at this time in life. My gpa is average, not bad but not stellar either. I have no medical volunteer experience whatsoever. I am not confident in my ability to get an excellent MCAT score because the MCAT mostly covers subjects I was very weak in during undergrad.
If, despite all odds, let’s say I actually got into a med school. That is another solid 4 years of very challenging class material that I am not particularly interested in. Don’t get me wrong I do really enjoy learning about the different body systems and organs and how they function but I usually get quite exhausted and bored when classes I only have general interest in delve into tiny details. In addition the only science class I have ever gotten an A in was general biology. The only B’s I got were in genetics and fundamentals of cell biology. Everything else was in the C or lower range. Not promising of how my performance would be in med school level classes.
What if I ended up actually really enjoying these classes? Well there is the time commitment to think about. I heard in med school you take as much as 30 credits a semester, with no large breaks. I have survived undergrad by always being very careful not to overschedule myself and by recuperating during break time. Even if I love my classes and enjoy the rotations, the sheer amount of work would be dangerous to my mental/emotional health and stability. I have a serious mental illness and while I am loathe to allow it to limit me in what I can do, I acknowledge med school could be quite dangerous to me because of this.
So as you can see it makes way more sense for me to be a nurse practitioner. It all comes down to an issue of pride. It’s very irritating.
