I REALLY don’t think that med school adcomms consider that any nurse, or EMT, or RT, or any of the ancillary med personnel who can demonstrate the high academic achievement necessary for admission to med school, should be kept out because medicine would be “poaching” from ancillary professions. “We would have taken you. Obviously, with your 4.0 science GPA and 99th % MCAT, you have the ability to succeed in medical school. But we really feel that since you’re already in nursing, you should just stay there…”
There was a very bright girl in my neighborhood who would have made a fine doctor, but she was passionate about going into nursing. She got the highest level degree in oncology nursing available at that point. She quickly rose to the highest master’s level nursing position in the children’s oncology unit. And when I saw her a decade later at an oncology meeting… she was an oncologist. When I asked her why she’d switched, she laughed at me for even asking, saying that there had been insufficient intellectual challenge in nursing, and that she’d been a fool not to have listened to all who were telling her that she was making a big mistake, choosing nursing over medicine.
The OP was able to get admitted to UCB. The only reason that she should choose nursing over UCB and premed is if she is passionately committed to the nursing profession (in which case she would have only been applying to nursing schools), or if she is afraid that she would fail in the premed track (a reasonable fear, but if she was bright enough to be admitted to UCB, she likely has the ability to get through the premed track and get into medical school).
That’s why it seems to me that her real issue is choosing her profession, rather than choosing the school. Because the tracks are so divergent, switching would likely take at least 2 summers and a school year (15 months) in order to either do a BA/BS to BSN program, or do a post-bac pre-med program. But it’s really not the end of the world if one makes that decision to switch in the future. It is possible.