Wonder what I should do-career thoughts

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My current want is to be a psychiatric nurse practitioner. However I have no experience whatsoever with nursing or even working in the psych field. Therefore I don’t actually know if I’ll like it. I tried out research and realized I wasn’t really thrilled about it. Maybe I will get back into it again someday but I need something new to try. I am worried the same will happen with nursing and it will result in a lot of wasted time and money.

I don’t know how to get experience before I start nursing school though. I have been looking for psych internships and 99% want you to be full-time, unpaid, which first off is exploitive and just awful (you should at least make minimum wage!!) and more importantly I will not have time to do a full time internship and take all the prereq courses I need to take to get into the nursing program, it would be a disaster. The other 1% do offer pay but I still just will not have time and it is not mentally healthy for me to have a full time job as well as a full course load.

I’ve done everything else I can, I have done research on the job, I have talked to people I know who have the job, etc. but I really feel you don’t really KNOW until you do it yourself.

Meanwhile my parents are pressuring me to start making my own money and just want me to take a minimum wage part time job just to build up cash in the interim before I’d start nursing school. Which is the most realistic option for me but again I am very nervous I will end up not liking nursing. (Even though from my research it seems a really good fit for me skill wise and seems like I would like it, I am still nervous) I don’t know what to do with myself really. If this doesn’t pan out I’ll really have no idea what to do with myself.

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This is hard for everyone but harder for schizophrenics, I imagine. I decided to go to school for the things I was good at. Unfortunately, now I’m going to be competing with a lot of people who are good at these things and have experience and are younger than me. And, as of yet, I still don’t KNOW if it’s the right path for me even though I went so far as to complete grad school. It fits my Holland types and I excel at it but until I’m sitting at a desk in an office doing it, I won’t know. Granted, I did start volunteering but that was six years into school. Now I finally feel a little bit secure but things could still change.

I know you want a solution - so did I, but I think the best we can do is try and see. If it doesn’t work out, switch majors and try again. It does look like a waste of money on paper but that’s better than spending our lives in career-regret. There isn’t an easy way to know, especially if we can’t just dedicate 80 hours a week to figuring it out in a real-world scenario while going to school. It sounds like you did your homework. Now if nursing isn’t for you in the long-run, you know you made an effort to figure that out and you can move on without being too hard on yourself.

Don’t forget that people do change majors - “normies” even. It happens a lot. Not only that but people graduate and end up in different fields than they went to school for. These aren’t failures: just people learning who they are and are not. There’s no shame in that.

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