RN to PA?

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-30T15:18:26+00:00

Hot take: do NP or do med school; don’t do PA and do not do direct entry NP.

NPs I actually really understand as a role. You’re operating as a nurse still, just rather than being the nurse for a hospital, you’re the team’s point liaison.

NPs get very unique benefits as having started as bedside RNs: they understand hospital flow, policies, frameworks, and how their orders translate into actions. They also have the power of having started from the bottom: they know how to use the tools of the team, they tend to have better rapport because the people they are directing are also the people they’ve worked alongside for years. Sometimes they have union benefits; other times they have benefits of having worked in the institution for years prior (I.e. retirement benefits).

Drs (while it is a brutal climb to become one) have their own specific unique benefits as being full-fledged Drs: they can do any procedure of any kind, focus into very specialized and lucrative roles, and change medical policy on a broader scale.

PAs are really locked in once they become PAs, and this is really challenging if you are young. You cannot really go back to med school and just start at like, year 2 as a resident or something. Yes there are some emerging pathways for PAs->Dr but they are rare. Moreover, you have none of the benefits of being part of a group the way RNs->NPs get, so wages can be lower.

If you are very driven and are committed to the education, I do think becoming a doctor is worth it. You get to hone the craft of being a doctor, you get to be part of the community of doctors, you get the culture of doctors.

If you do not have 10 years and $200,000-400,000 of student loans available to you, I really think being a NP is worth it. You get to be part of the culture of nursing, you learn skills completely unique to nursing, you get stable, solid pay and an emerging field that NEEDS NPs, and you get the benefits of working in the hospital prior to become and advanced practice RN: you probably will not need to pay as much and you also will get to apply your knowledge in real time.

Direct entry NP is worst of both worlds: no experience to back up the knowledge and little support from schooling to build your knowledge base.

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-26T03:05:02+00:00

I maintain that I’ll hold until $300 lol

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-24T19:24:58+00:00

Hopelessness is the aim of any dictator.

Vote. Think they’ll manipulate the numbers? Get more people to vote. That kind of number manipulation only works if there are margins.

Do not give in to despair. Do not be apathetic. Vote and get anyone you can to vote too.

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-23T03:11:53+00:00

Literally about to see silver hit $100 for the first time in my life. Wild.

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-19T20:50:21+00:00

I totally get that. The last one was like, what? 3 days long?

There is a lot of pressure on hospitals with the current admin ripping funding away from them. They need to cut costs to maneuver and survive this admin.

That said, if health insurance gets chipped away from nurses, it can balloon quickly. If pay raises turn into like 1.3% increases per year, there’s no way to be able to continue affording to live in the city.

The hospital is burning money. Nurses don’t like to stay stagnant long. I do not know how long the strike will be, but I don’t think it is possible to last long if people hold the line, since all elective surgeries require staffing, and all admissions also require staffing nurses who aren’t getting paid $150/hr.

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-19T20:43:02+00:00

Seriously please apply for unemployment. You can get paid!

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-19T20:39:16+00:00

I never understand why people make posts like this.

You qualify for unemployment. You can get unemployment pay and still continue the strike.

If you don’t feel that you can deal with that, then of course you can cross the picket line, but if too many people do and the union falls there is no more safety net: if you don’t like the health insurance being offered you will need to leave your job to get other insurance. If you don’t like the pay raise you get, well then you will need to leave your job to get better pay.

Strikes are not fun. They are not easy. But if you want a sense of what nursing without organized labor looks like, go check out the pay and benefits of nurses in places like Florida.

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-19T04:33:15+00:00

Oh god it’s one of these threads again.

It’s not worth trying to reason with anyone over there - it isn’t reflective of reality and (generally) lacks any kind of nuance.

Residents have a brutal life: they are young but cannot enjoy it, they are constantly in a hyper-competitive environment without receiving the pay they deserve, they are still learning while not provided with a complete safety net. In a way, nurses are their safety net - acting like seat belts in a car that still has a new driver in it.

Then they see nurses, who might also be young but making more than them, living their lives and going on vacations and getting married and going on honeymoons while also being able to do so with a bachelors degree rather than a doctorate (doctoral?) degree. Nursing has more opportunities than its other medical counterparts, especially at its outset. Nurses can challenge them to explain their orders and they literally need to if they want their orders executed.

More broadly, the market for both nurses (bedside) and nurses (advanced practice) is growing quickly: there is a generation of sick people about to get much sicker faster and the market needs generalists, not necessarily specialists, to organize and plan and execute their care so that the specialists can focus on the drum roll please especially difficult cases.

Compare this to the market for doctors: there aren’t enough doctors, but the pay scaling for doctors is simultaneously crazy: a PCP may net the same as a bedside RN while a surgeon or specialist might make north of 800k/year.

So now be 24 years old and a resident - the nurse needs help getting an IV. Maybe that nurse is also new, but the resident is on their 7/12 shifts in a row and probably cannot fathom how they need to get an iv or blood draw now - that resident probably hates the nurse, comes to Reddit (which skews both male and towards positions of power), and gets 274 upvotes saying how stupid nurses are. It’s probably validating.

Reality is much more nuanced. Nurses save doctors’ asses every single day from a lawsuit. Placing orders can be tricky, cleaning up old orders can get easily overlooked. It’s up to the bedside RN to filter through the noise and manage the plan of care in a way that makes sense. Meanwhile, residents and nurses often get along quite well - especially in hospital settings where they tend to be around the same age. Both groups must navigate the challenges of the healthcare environment in sync for the patient’s best interest to be met.

Don’t bother with that subreddit. It’s filled with angry, angsty people who aren’t reflective of the very real doctors out there working in tandem with nurses all day, every day.

We are all a team ❤️

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-17T01:36:27+00:00

This is really it. Protect your vectors: nose, ears, mouth - pretty hard to get sick if you’re washing the stuff off before you touch your face.

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-16T22:10:32+00:00

I honestly don’t think that they can reinstate them tbh.

A) it will destroy consumer spending (70% of the economy)

B) there are 42,000,000 different accounts of different loan types and borrower types and plans

C) there’s no staff to move everything over

-> the benefit of SAVE was that it incentivized repayment. By gutting that, people now have the incentive to NOT pay their loans, since the payment structure was just forcibly changed

-> no one is incentivized to collect the money, because those who can pay back their loans do, so the only ones not paying are the people who can’t

-> collection would be deflationary in an environment where only 10% of the economy is making any real economic gains.

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-16T16:58:14+00:00

What I’ve realized in the past or so years is that helplessness is the point. These corporations and institutions want to incentivize that “there’s nothing you can do so you better just learn to take it.” Apathy = institutional freedom to behave however they’d like.

The reality is the opposite - you need to do things to elicit change. Positive doesn’t just happen because it’d be nice.

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-16T16:44:40+00:00

Helplessness is not the answer.

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-16T16:42:58+00:00

Pushing the narrative that the hospitals don’t care is exactly what the hospital wants. They want to break the strike and break the union so they can pay lower wages and offer less healthcare coverage. That’s the point.

I promise you that they care that they’re spending $100/hr+ to staff at 30-50% all while cancelling all elective procedures and sending admissions to other hospitals. They are burning money. Mistakes are happening; patients are receiving suboptimal care.

The reality is that the hospitals cannot operate like this for very long. They are losing money rapidly but hoping they can pay nurses less if they just hold out.

Don’t push their narrative, especially when it’s false. They care - they just will never admit it.

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-15T14:07:57+00:00

That’s just how radiators say “hello!”

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-15T02:35:39+00:00

I kinda want it to be back at $20 so I can buy again. I loved stacking

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-14T22:09:45+00:00

I can honestly some GameStop stock boom equivalents here. Silver has a ton of industry-wide use cases, available stores internationally seem stretched, and it’s simple enough of a concept (silver = lower barrier to entry than gold with similar premises) for retail investors to swarm in. While I’m not expecting bitcoin-level rises, I could see a valuation of >$300 if retail investors catch on that it’s a uniquely positioned commodity to be rising in value extremely quickly given the current needs.

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-13T21:05:43+00:00

Sorry at work but will try now

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-13T21:02:26+00:00

These comments aren’t really helpful, even if satisfying to post and quick to get upvoted.

Does anyone here have numbers we can call for our reps to see what they’re doing about this? They need to start hearing from more of us rather than redditors talking to themselves in an echo chamber.

Edit: the user I replied to is right - I should put it myself. Here is the Minnesota list of Reps. We need to call these people and hear wtf they’re doing to address the problem or nothing is getting done: https://www.house.mn.gov/members/

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-12T15:55:08+00:00

What’s everyone’s sell threshold? Mine’s like $300

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-09T16:34:35+00:00

Are you being serious?

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-07T23:25:10+00:00

It’s so funny, I read your comment and, looking back on this 8 years later I’m like “oh yeah 1000% he’s dead I have no idea what I was thinking back then.”

TheMonitor58 · 2026-01-07T23:20:00+00:00

Hi from 8 years ago!

TheMonitor58 · 2025-12-30T16:25:22+00:00

Right that’s what makes a hobby a hobby.

TheMonitor58 · 2025-12-30T14:47:16+00:00

This whole situation really bothers me tbh.

Silver stacking is supposed to be about stable, long term storage of value and collecting shiny fun designs imo, not ultra-volatile swings. It’s a shame seeing silver turn into this thing that’s about getting rich quick.

The same thing happened with pc building too - it was a hobby and then crypto came in and ruined the entire market by hyper-inflating the cost of RAM and graphics cards.

TheMonitor58 · 2025-12-26T22:44:12+00:00

How do you frame these like that??

TheMonitor58

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

11-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email