Walk 3.5 miles a night in my shoes, and you won't have to wonder why I'm changing careers.

Nursing is only lucrative in California and Boston. If you're anywhere else in the country, the pay is generally abyssmal compared to the responsibility and the stress. In what other industry can you work 12 hours straight and barely have time to go urinate, much less eat a lunch. At one point in my career I could eat a Big Mac in under 45 seconds. Why? Because I had to. That's literally all the time I had to eat.

I'm not leaving nursing to go work in a cube farm. I'm leaving nursing to be a serial entrepreneur. I'll be able to work 2 or 3 days a week, and spend the rest of my time coding and starting a business until I can get paid enough to devote full time to the business.

So, what is the worst that can happen to this young man? Taking a year off to live off of savings to start a web app. Please, if I have no imagination, tell me what your worst case scenario is.

Being technical and having industry knowledge is a powerful combination. I don't think the past career in nursing is sunk cost at all...just the opposite.

I'd be shocked if iamelgringo didn't have 50 ideas of products/solutions that would make nursing work easier for nurses, cheaper for hospitals, and safer/more consistent for patients. The only question is if he has the stomach to try to sell to the medical industry... (don't know if I would)

You're right. I do have about 50+ ideas. I would love to get out of the health care profession for a while, though. I think the key is in making Doctor's/nurses lives easier without having to sell to hospitals. Hospital budgets usually run on a 1-2% profit margin, so IT budgets are usually pretty thin, and their tolerance to failure is really very thin. We'll see what happens next year after I'm done with school, though.