Bob Cook MD’15
I was a nurse for four years. Before that I was a nurse assistant for a year. I did nursing school at UMass-Amherst. So for me it was I loved doing nursing and I thought that medicine is a nice mix between being able to think through really deep problems but at the end of the day—you can do all this thinking and wondering and everything—but at the end of the day you have an actual person you actually have to help. Both medicine and nursing are doing that. Nursing is a little bit more on the helping side and medicine is a bit more on the thinking side. And I kind of wanted a little bit more of the thinking side. I loved nursing and I loved what I was doing but I felt like my brain was just a little too busy. I think that as a nurse you’re constantly asked to think about all aspects of a person. In medicine as much as we try to have that broad approach, we’re really asked to think about what’s wrong and you can get focused in really narrowly. My experience as a nurse has helped me remember that there’s all these aspects to the people that we’re taking care of, the social aspects, the psychological aspects, all these characteristics.
