What I Must Do

As I'm about to head home for Christmas, I decided it would be best if I can manage to not look like an idiot in front of my parents when I explain how smart it was to quit law. The first thing I had to do, to that end, was to look into what exactly is needed to apply to nursing school. Specifically, I needed to look at the first step of the process - taking (and doing well in) the prerequisite courses that I never took as an undergraduate.

This didn't seem like a daunting task at first. Medical Schools and Law Schools all have similar requirements. The application requirements for college were pretty standardized as well, but that's not the case here.

Each school has its own idiosyncrasies. Some schools require a course in theology, while others require one in ethics; some require a course on abnormal psychology, while others explain that a course on abnormal psychology will not satisfy their psychology requirement. Some schools don't even require the GRE, while others require it only if your GPA is below a certain mark. I looked at seven schools to get the information I have. Based on it, I'm assuming that the more schools I look at, the more oddities I'll run into regarding prerequisites.

Complaining about this won't help me though, so I went through my information to see what courses a majority of schools did have in common. This is a nice starting point - and some schools don't require any more than the courses in this list. I compiled this (really) preliminary info from a set of schools I'd be interested in attending based on geographic location or reputation.

• Human Anatomy and Physiology (A Year of Each, Including Labs)
• Microbiology
• Nutrition
• Lifespan Development (Also Called Human Development, or Developmental Psychology)
• Organic or Biochemistry
• Ethics

Other common requirements include things such as ~6 Hours of Humanities, 9 Hours of Social Sciences, etc. Nearly every school requires a basic course in statistics, but I'm not listing it since I got that done as an undergraduate.

Note: To be fair, I'm only looking at schools with (at a minimum) an accelerated BSN program (and I'd prefer the ones with accelerated BSN programs that immediately flow into MSN programs). It's possible that these programs are partly responsible for all the differing sets of requirements.

Something not required, but very strongly encouraged, is experience working in health care. I'll try to look into possible volunteer positions when I go home for the holiday. I'm worried that it will be tough for me though, if I need to take these prerequisite courses and find a paying job as well... but I'll see what I can come up with. I'll also talk to admissions officials at a few schools back home, if I'm able to get appointments over the holidays. That should give me all sorts of good information on getting started. Until January though, I'm off~ Happy Holidays.

Good News

I finally was able to get in touch with the right people from the office of admissions at Emory Law. For the last week or so since withdrawing, I've been under the impression that I'd have to pay back the scholarships I'd been given over my three semesters there. That was kind of bad news, cause the total would have been some 30,000 dollars. I was 90% sure or so that I'd have to pay it back.

But today I found out that I don't have to pay it back after all!

If I ever decide to go back to Emory for some reason, I won't be eligible for the scholarship, but that's ok. That's an unlikely event at best, and 30k should go a long ways towards paying for the undergraduate prerequisites I'll have to take again.

In unrelated news, I also got a cell phone. It's shiny, slides open, and has a red back. It makes me happy. ^^;

The First Day of the Rest of My Life

Yesterday I quit Emory Law School.

There are a lot of reasons why... mostly law is never something I really wanted to do; it's just something that I ended up doing after I graduated from college by way of default. There's not many clear paths to take with a liberal arts degree, and getting a decent-paying job after you graduate from a respectable law school is a fairly safe bet. But I was dying a slow death with each class on accounting, taxes, the federal rules of evidence, and contract drafting. (Although some classes were neat. I had a great one on ancient Roman law, and there were a few interesting ones on Torts and Criminal Law.)

I had narrower interests: since high school, Japan and medicine were the two main ones. I talked myself out of getting a Japanese major because it didn't seem like something I could trade for a job, and I gave up on medicine because I was entirely too caught up with grades and rankings when I was in college. I figured I'd have no career as a doctor if I didn't go to a top 10 or so Medical School, and I figured I'd have no shot at that if I wasn't in the top 15% or so of my class. First year Calculus quickly taught me that I wouldn't end up in that part of the class if I stuck on a medical track, if nothing else. For whatever reason, other jobs in healthcare didn't strike me as options. So - I gave up. I switched to a major in political science, which I did quite well in, and then slid right into law school. There's something painful and soulless about that path. There was for me at least.

Mentally, I died around the end of high school when I gave up on following various dreams. They may have been naive in hindsight, but every day since then, I've been unhappy to varying degrees over the failure to stick to my ideals.

Getting out of law school is a huge and exciting event. It's giving me a chance to go back all those years and head down the right path. It's a chance to uphold my old ideals again, and a chance to redeem myself.

I'm looking at becoming a nurse practitioner/anastheseologist for now, but keeping an open mind towards other options including trying for an MD.

It's also a big risk.

I'm lucky enough that my family has an extra apartment I can move into in a few months, when I exit my lease here, but I'm giving up what's a fairly guaranteed well-paying job for the chance at getting another job, which is unlikely to pay as much. In the interim, I'll have to raise the money for food/some needed undergrad courses /my new graduate courses on my own this time around.

Whether it's a wise decision or not, it's a very imporant personal one, and it's the inspiration for this blog. I hope to use this to track the journey from my first day after having left law school to the first day of my new career.