4 Aspects to Consider When Deliberating Nursing School vs. Medical School

When you’re deciding on your career choice, you may find yourself stuck between becoming a nurse and a doctor. It can be hard to know which to choose, especially if you’re not already in that world. Who does what? What does a typical day look like? The paths to becoming a doctor or a nurse are very different, as are their daily routines.

Both see patients, but the time spent with each patient is much different. Doctors take longer to graduate, but then make more money. Your personality may drive which choice would best suit you. Let’s get into details.

1. Med School Takes Longer Than Nursing School

Depending on the program, nurses go to school from one to four years. Some nursing schools offer accelerated programs to get your Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) in 18 months or less, while some nursing students follow the traditional four-year route. Licensed practical nurses (LPNs) usually follow a one or two-year program.

Medical school is a blanket term for several stages of education:

• Pre-med: As a prospective doctor, you must first get a bachelor’s degree and take courses like biology and chemistry to prepare for med school. (4 years)
• MCAT: Pre-med students take a standardized test which you must pass to get into medical school.
• Medical school: Where you learn the basics of human anatomy and pathophysiology. (4 years)
• Residency: You have your MD, and you spend this time gaining experience in various medical settings. (3+ years)
• Fellowship: This is where you hone your specialty and choose which area of medicine you want to pursue. (1-2 years)

As you can see from some simple math, nursing can take as little as one year, while med school can take up to 14 years from start to finish.

2. Nurse vs. Doctor Knowledge

Nurse and doctor knowledge has a lot of overlap. They both study a lot of the same topics, including:

• Anatomy and physiology
• Basics of microbiology
• Pharmacology
• Pathophysiology

Doctors differ from nurses in depth of knowledge. While nurses stop after one course on pathophysiology, for example, doctors go on to study each disease in much more detail. They have to look at a list of symptoms, lab tests, imaging, and vital signs and diagnose what’s wrong with the patient.

Now, while many seasoned nurses may know quite a bit more than a brand-new resident, that resident still has many more years of study ahead of them. A nurse is trained to treat a broad variety of patients, and doctors go into specialties.

That being said, nurses have a lot of general knowledge that doctors forget after they start specializing. In many hospitals, doctors rely on nurses’ knowledge and ability to insert catheters and NG tubes, and to generally have an overall feel for how their patients are doing.

3. The Day-to-Day of the Job

The daily routine for nurses and doctors can look similar in primary care settings, but quite different in a large facility. As a nurse in a hospital, your shifts are different lengths, you see fewer patients per day, and your task lists look nothing alike.

Location

In a primary care setting, nurses’ and doctors’ locales are mostly the same, but in a hospital or care facility, they vary a lot. As a nurse, you usually stay in one spot throughout your shift. You have a patient assignment and stay close to them all day. Doctors, depending on their specialty, see many more patients all over the facility.

Schedule

You can work a version of the “9-5” as a nurse if you decide to work in a provider’s office, in some pre-op or OR settings, home health, or case management. If you work for a hospital or another 24-hour facility, though, you will probably work 12-hour shifts.

Doctors’ schedules depend on their level of education and specialty. Surgeons come in different hours of the day and night for emergency OR needs. Some residents work 24 hours on, 24 hours off. Schedules can vary wildly, and most facility physicians have somewhere in the building set aside to catch a few minutes of shut-eye when they can.

Patient Contact

In a facility setting, since you have the same group of patients each shift as a nurse, you spend a lot more time with them than their doctors will. When you consider which path would fit you better, think about if you would prefer to pop in and out of rooms, or if you’d like to spend more time with your patients.

In an office setting, this dynamic looks different. As a primary care office nurse, you and your physician will spend an almost equal amount of time with patients as they come in for their appointments.

Tasks

If you become a nurse, you will assess patients throughout your shift by analyzing their vital signs and listening to their lungs and heart, for example. You will do things like start IVs, do dressing changes, drop NG tubes, and draw blood for labs. Different facilities have services for some of those things, and so every job is a little different that way. You may also be expected to assist with getting patients out of bed and helping clean them up.

Doctors can often do everything they ask a nurse to do, but they simply don’t have the time. Their tasks look more like deciphering labs, vital signs, and physical assessments to decide how a patient is doing and what other steps should be taken. What a doctor does can vary. For example, surgeons split their time between operating and seeing patients in the office.

4. Education Cost and Salary

As a nursing student, you will pay anywhere from $9,000 to $27,000 per year for your degree. Medical students pay up to $63,000 per year. Of course, which school you choose has a huge impact on the cost.

No surprise here: doctors make more than nurses. The average salary for nurses in the US is $89,000 per year, while doctors make an average of $208,000 annually after residency.

You have a lot of things to think about while you decide if you want to go to nursing school or med school. Think about how you want your days to look, how much you can pay for school, and when you want to graduate. Both options are difficult but rewarding. Whatever you choose, you have a fulfilling career ahead of you.