<p>There are a plethora of specialties available in nursing, too, and respecializing in nursing is (I think) actually easier than respecializing in medicine. APRNs who wish to respecialize can do certificate programs specifically intended for that - so if you become a nurse anesthetist and decide a year later that you hate it and you want to do family practice, you can do a FNP post-master’s certificate program part-time; it’ll probably take you 1.5 years while you’re still earning a full-time nurse anesthetist salary ($109,000 is the average) and then poof, you can practice as a family nurse practitioner.</p>
<p>As a physician…what do you do when you want to respecialize? Do you have to go through residency again? I genuinely don’t know, so it may be worth looking into.</p>
<p>Nurses can do a lot of things - they can go into research and teaching; they can go into health care administration (including roles like chief nursing officer); they can do public health and epidemiology; they can do healthcare consulting and insurance. Not that physicians can’t do all of those things too - I actually don’t have an opinion on this either way - but it’s just that a lot of people don’t realize the tremendous flexibility within the nursing field, as most of the time they are only familiar with med/surg hospital floor RNs.</p>