I am currently a senior in high school. I change my mind quite often about what I want to do with my life. Now however, I seem to be stuck on nursing. I’ve looked into it, and I’ve volunteered at hospitals, and I really enjoy being there and being able to help and comfort people. I consider myself to be very driven. I have straight A’s and I’m taking all AP classes, including 2 classes at the community college. I also tutor at the elementary school after school and I really like working and playing with the kids. The only thing I’m really worried about is how soft-spoken I am. When I think of a nurse, I imagine someone who is loud and full of energy, but I’m quiet and I don’t have a lot of confidence. When I’m volunteering and I go into a room where the patient has tons of visitors, I feel nervous and self-conscious. However, I like to think that since I’m soft-spoken I might be a comfort to people. But can I still be a nurse if I’m quiet? Will this be something I’ll eventually get over,?
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Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board, aeln17. Questions seeking opininos and advice go in In My Humble Opinion (IMHO). I will move this for you.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
“Loud and full of energy” ?? :lol: Good grief
Qualities that are good for nurses to have:
•caring nature,
•detail-oriented,
•emotionally stable,
•great judgment,
•physical endurance and
•extraordinary communication skills.
Some nurses tend to be loud (I’m one of them) and we work especially well with a subset of patients who like that approach.
Other nurses tend to be quiet and even meek, and they work especially well with a subset of patients who like that approach.
Patients are people, and like all people, they’ve got their preferences when it comes to communication style. A good supervisor will both assign you patients with whom you work well naturally, and also help you to push your own boundaries a bit so you can work with the others better.
If you can keep a cool head under pressure, think critically and creatively, have a bladder the size of a Buick and curiosity and compassion in equal measure, you can learn everything else you need to be a good nurse. 
Aeln17, if you still want to be a nurse as of graduation, get a CNA certificate. It’s a 6- or 8-week community college course, and many employers will pay for it if you agree to work for them for a period of time. It’s the perfect way to find out if this really is what you want to do.
In the meantime, maybe you could be a volunteer at a hospital or community clinic?
Detail oriented, huh? 
But the CNA suggestion is a great one. At the school I went to, you could either take two courses in the Continuing Education (no credits) series and then take the state exam to become a CNA, OR you could take the state exam after your first semester of the RN program. Either way, it’s not only great for testing the waters, but also for making contacts and proving yourself to people who may hire you as an RN later on.
There is room for all types in nursing and it’s a very rewarding career with lots of options. Go for it! Even if you find later that you want to do something else, you will be in a position to support yourself while you make the change.
Look here to get some up-to-date information:http://www.onetonline.org/
Curious - what makes you choose nurse over Doctor?
One slightly cautionary note-- the job market for nurses isn’t quite as good as it has been over the last few years. I’ve got a couple of friends who just finished nursing programs and are having trouble finding jobs locally, and are probably going to have to go work someplace out of town for a while. That certainly shouldn’t discourage you, since over the long term and once you gain some experience you should be plenty employable, but you might want to try to get a feel for what the local job market is like for the various types of nursing positions before you decide how to proceed.
Am I the only one who thought this was the latest round of the breast-feeding wars?
If you are a straight A student and in all AP/dual-credit courses, you need to go straight to college, or apply to college, get accepted, and defer. You are a desirable candidate. The pool of available scholarships, grants, etc., is much smaller if you are applying later, as a “non-traditional student”.
If you are going through a B.S. program (which you should), you do not have to commit too much too soon. I’ve had a couple students who went into nursing but switched to a related field a couple years in–there are so many health care jobs that you don’t even know about until you start to get involved in the field. In those cases, they found most of their early course work still applied.
One thing I would caution you about: you want a nursing program that expands your options, not limits them. It’s not enough if a program prepares you for certification: it should leave you with the skills and background and experience to go on to get your Master’s if you decide you want to specialize. At this point in your life–young, with 40 working years ahead of you, and an excellent academic track record–you want a program that thinks of itself as the first level of a professional track, not one that thinks of itself as the top level of a vocational track.
This is an excellent point! One of my besties from high school started in a pre-Med program and eventually morphed into a Chem/Bio major. She worked for years in the county health department as an inspector, and after retiring from the county, she took a similar job in a nearby city. A bennie from her job - she knows what restaurants to avoid.
But I do agree that unless you’re absolutely sure, passionate, and can’t wait to be a nurse, you need to start with core classes that can apply to any field, all the while doing what you need to do to figure out what you want to be when you grow up. And don’t feel like you’ve got to decide, then stay in a career path forever. I started out wanting to teach, then I did military time as an electronics technician, and ultimately (in my 30s) found my calling as an engineer. I envied those who knew what path they wanted to follow, but I enjoyed sampling options - it worked for me.
Good luck!!
My SO is anything but ‘loud and full of energy’. She decided to become a nurse after seeing the live coverage of the Indonesian tsunami. She’s a Christian and wanted to help people, and she set a goal of becoming a nurse and helping people who need it.
I’ve thought about the medical field. (I once got an EMT certification.) There are many different things nurses can do. The SO wants to do medical missionary work, and she’d love to do geriatric care – especially in a hospice. (She was a phlebotomist for a dozen years, and liked working with old people.) A friend is a CNA and does in-home care. picunurse is (was?) in premie care. Different jobs take different personalities. The SO is a very caring person who works well with elderly people. Me? I don’t think I could stand it. I have a morbid sense of humour and frequently use gallows humour (not around her though, if I know what’s good for me). But everyone knows that sort of thing is a defence mechanism. I care more than I will ever let on. I could not bear the deaths. (As a heathen, I can’t comfort myself with believing they are in a better place. Ask me where you go when you die, and I’ll say ‘In the ground.’) OTOH, I think I’d be suited to acute care. Of course I’d rather fly a medivac helicopter, but I could get into being a medivac nurse. Or work in the ER. In hospice, you know the inevitable outcome. In an acute care, you win some and you lose some; but most of your patients are going to walk out of there. I’m a fighter, not a comforter.
To the point: As a non-medical person I can see that there are different roles for different personalities. You don’t have to be loud and moving at Mach 2 in many of them. A quiet personality is appropriate for many things.
You do have to be confident, though. A coworker’s daughter wanted to become a nurse. She excelled in her classwork, but her lack of confidence made her fail her clinicals. But here’s the thing: They teach you what to do. You’ll spend two years to become an RN with an AS degree, and another couple of years if, as my SO did, you get a BSN. (Incidentally, in this area the SO couldn’t find any nursing positions except in convalescent homes with an Associate’s in Nursing. Once she added the Bachelor’s ‘BSN’ after her name, she started getting calls.) You will learn everything you need to know to start nursing, and you’ll continue to learn through experience and continuing education. You will know what you need to do; and you will know you know it, even if you don’t know you know you know. As a new nurse, you’re probably not going to be in a situation that’s over your head. And a lot of knowledge is going to be fresh in your head. When you’ve spent two years or, preferably, four years learning and training, passing the NCLEX, and getting your license, you have every reason to be confident!
I agree in the general sense, but as far as I know, there is no RN program which “limits” your future educational options, and the profession as a whole views any program as only the first step along a lifetime of mandatory continuing education. I went the AAS route, and now I’m in an RN to BSN program (entirely online; as long as I’m working as a nurse, my work counts as my “clinical experience”) and when I finish with that I can go on to my Master’s and Doctoral programs if I want. And regardless of degrees, we need to do Continuing Education every year to keep our licenses.
I’ll also add, and this is entirely field specific, that while there is a lot of pressure to get your Masters, there’s no need to, at this point in time. In fact, I think the pressure to get a Masters is doing a disservice to the patients and to the profession as a whole. We need experienced nurses at the bedside, actually taking care of the patients. When we pressure all of our nurses to rush into Masterses and then shove them into administration and teaching and research, we end up with new grads and slackers doing the bulk of patient care. There’s something fundamentally wrong with that, in my book. If you want to be “just” a bedside nurse, that’s awesome and wonderful and don’t educate yourself out of hireability just to see a few more letters after your name!
My wife is a nurse and seldom raises her voice.
The nursing job market isn’t as good as it use to be; however, I think a lot of that is regional. In our area there are always nursing job adverts in the paper and hundreds on-line.
As you aren’t sure what you want to do, consider going to college and taking general studies for the first couple of years. Then you could better decide.
Another option would be to join the military and get into a medical field. After your 3 or 4 year enlistment, you would have a good idea if medicine is a career for you plus you’ll have a lot of education benefits to help pay for college when you get out. Heck my niece is becoming a doctor and the US Air Force ROTC is paying for it. I think she has to serve at least 8 years though.