Whether you’ve finished studying at a
nursing school in Illinois or a nursing school in California, the undergraduate
degree you earned from it will not be nearly as costly as taking on a graduate
level study programs afterwards. Because of this, the idea might have little
appeal or even seem scary to a lot of potential grad students, but this need
not be the case. Despite the expenses and dangers of being overwhelmed by
graduate debt, there are several excellent reasons to pick up from nursing
school and see where you can go with a doctoral or master’s degree that
complements your undergrad credentials.
1. Enhancing Market Appeal
An undergrad degree in nursing school is
not a bad bet when it comes to creating career options. The population of the
United States is aging and elderly care jobs will be in ever sharper demand
because of this.
However, despite this, you will still have
a fair bit of competition from other nursing undergrads and there is a more
than decent chance that the labor market in the profession reaches a partial
saturation point of some kind at some point in the near future, at least enough
to drive wages down slightly. What this means for you is the need to hedge your
bets by finding a way to stand out from the crowd. And while a graduate medical
school program may be expensive, the sheer number of options for an outstanding
new study field is enormous.
2. Possibility of Moving into a Full
Medical Career
Why not?! You’ve already finished nursing
school so the deeper waters of medical school won’t be such strange waters for
you at all and, assuming you pass through your doctoral degree with good
scores, you could find yourself entering the full fledged medical profession in
just a few years.
Yes the debt load this adds to your
education costs will be enormous but medical specialists and even GPs are not
likely to become unnecessary any time soon; for the same reason as already
mentioned above: the medical needs of an aging population are only going to
grow enormously.
3. Improving your Compensation
By taking those additional years of
graduate studies and gaining a doctoral or masters degree in some health
related field, you’re almost certain to fall into a category of career seekers
who make at least $70 to $80,000 more than their undergraduate counterparts,
and especially in the medical and biosciences professions.
In fact, this trend applies across the
board in a very large selection of post graduate professions; students who
graduate at the master’s and doctoral level generally outperform their
undergraduate colleagues by 50 to 100% in terms of earnings per year. Thus, even
if you jump from an undergrad degree in nursing into something completely
unrelated in graduate school, you’ve still got a very decent chance of
developing a fine career out of your investment.
4. Increased Options
As alluded to above in terms of compensation,
market appeal and expanded options in the medical filed in general, your
options overall will dramatically expand not only upon choosing to select a
graduate study program but also upon finishing whichever program you’ve studied
for. This is especially the case if you pick your graduate degree strategically
so that it can be applied to several different specific career paths.
For example, a graduate degree in business
after an undergrad degree in nursing, even from small graduate programs like Benedictine
University or Olivet Nazarene
University in Illinois, can lead to an enormous plethora of interesting
career options on the business management side of the vast medical industry
that’s growing every year.
5. Following your Passion
Finally we come down to the most “from the
heart” reason for pursuing a graduate degree that you’d love to engage in: it’s
simply what you really feel passionate about doing! The value of this cannot be
understated and the call of a personal passion in some deeper area of medical
study that got sparked after finishing nursing school can be an excellent guide
for finding what will actually make you a happier person in your future career,
even if the potential financial ramifications are somewhat variable.
However, if your passion is what’s guiding
you, try to keep a practical mind about things nonetheless and take the course
of action that will give you the most results in the direction of what you want
but at the least cost.
