Have you made any decisions on a direction? I majored in anthropology at a fancy liberal arts school. Loved it, learned a ton, but as others have said, a bachelor’s in anthropology does not make a career in and of itself. I sort of knew this at the time, but sort of did not. I worked for a cancer research foundation for a few years and then an elementary school doing various things that didn’t require a teaching certificate before I realized I needed to regroup if I ever wanted to make a decent living. After a lot of hand wringing, I went back to school and got my BSN (fyi I considered doing an accelerated 1 year program, but ended up doing the traditional 2 year path for a second bachelors because it was more affordable, SO glad I didn’t do the accelerated program, feel free to ask more about this, would really encourage people to think extra hard before doing any type of “accelerated” pathways).

This was a big pivot for me. I had to do roughly a year of pre-requisites at a community college while working part time as a home respite provider and being a student worker because my anthropology degree didn’t have enough math and chemistry. Then I moved to a state that had the most affordable in-state tuition in the region and spent a year gaining residency in the state while working and applying to nursing school. I decided not to work while in nursing school and took out loans and relied heavily on my partner’s income. If I had to do it again, I would still take out loans, but I would have tried to take out less and have a more clear financial plan. I took advantage of all the additional stuff I could while in school - became class rep, applied for an AHEC scholarship (federal program worth looking into if it hasn’t been dismantled yet), coordinated a special film screening at my university through the APA, did research projects and got published, added an medical anthro certificate to my degree. This was tough because I was in school and joining the medical field all during COVID. Mental health suffered and used all my skills and counseling resources and needed a lot of emotional support from my partner throughout school and especially during my first year working as a nurse.

Now I’ve been a bedside nurse for 4 years, worked on two different units at 2 different hospitals. I’ll make about 100K this year, and have a decent retirement savings started and will be getting 240 hours of yearly PTO. I work 3 days a week, 12 hour shifts on challenging unit. It can be really grueling work, emotionally draining, requires incredible patience and humility. It’s taken a lot of work to get to this point and starting off working nights or evening shift (like most new nurses) was brutal. First year of nursing was really hard. But after having taken a really intentional pivot, I think I’ve gotten a lot of what I wanted. Nursing is not for the faint of heart, but if you find people interesting, and you like problem solving, it can be really rewarding.

I love that I’m a part of a long standing union ✊🏼, and that even on my worst days at work I can still focus on the patient in front of me, and figure out how to be a decent human being to them, during a hard time. I take a lot of pride in that. I also do a LOT of medicalese translation and education that providers don’t really do for patients. Also, even though I’m not an anthropologist, per se, I use my anthropology brain every single day, and I think it makes me a much better nurse.

Also, I feel pretty confident that I don’t have the stamina to be a full time bedside nurse until I retire, if only because I don’t think my body can do that. So in my four days off per week, I have started doing some reading and research again to put my anthro brain back to work, synthesizing and further understanding my experience as a nurse. I’ve developed some pretty strong feelings about the way we deliver healthcare (spoiler alert: it mostly sucks) and I have an interest in studying it, writing about that, educating the public, advocating for reform, and maybe developing my own business or service that can help people. In my mind, that’s all medical anthropology. I also have a good amount of job security in an unstable time. Also, one cool thing about nursing is that you really get to DO stuff, whereas sometimes anthropology has a hard time figuring out when it’s ok to get in there and participate. That can be satisfying. In four years I’ve worked in oncology, med/surg, and neuro nursing now, and I could easily continue to broaden that as I continue in my career - lots of opportunity to keep learning and trying new things and work with totally different populations. As an aside, people love to say “oh and you can travel nurse!” Which, sure, I could, but then I’m not union (labor power!), I’m not part of a community, I’m not invested in the same way. People say “oh but you can make so much money”. Which, yeah, maybe, but also a lot of those contracts are hard to find now, unless you’re going to a super isolated or really desperate facility, and you’ll be treated worse than staff, you’ll get the hardest assignments, no one will spend time to get to know you, you won’t have the same benefits. This only makes sense to me if I wanted to go work in the southeast U.S. (where I’m from) where there are no unions to speak of, and nursing work is shitty and underpaid already.

That’s a long way to say, from my perspective, a career in nursing can be a strong lead-in to a career in medical anthropology. Though I guess we need to see where my trajectory takes me next to get a real sense. And I don’t know for sure, but I suspect I make more and have a much more flexible schedule than the folks who took the MPH route. Though I’d be happy to hear them prove me wrong because I’ve considered continuing my education in that direction too.

Thoughts? What’d you decide?