Nurse.

I mean, nurses get paid a good salary, and the schedule sounds pretty good (36 hours a week/3 days a week - if you're working 12-hour shifts) but what they don't tell you or can't convey is...

...it's a totally hard job. Those 36 hours won't be like spending four and a half days a week at your office job. Oh, no. Not by a long shot. You won't be sitting down in your chair looking at your computer. No, you will be on your feet running around from the first minute until the last, charting standing up most of the time because you can't take the time to find a chair and sit down. Ever spent 12 hours walking from place to place? Try it sometime. Your back and knees will complain.

You won't get a regular lunch break. Some units don't do lunch breaks at all because they don't have enough staff to cover you being off the floor and patients always need to have a nurse assigned to them. If you do get a lunch break you will most likely do some charting (i.e. unpaid work) so you can try to catch up. Your lunch hour will never be at the same time, so you won't know if you need to chow down on the burgers someone kindly brought in from McD's now, or wait 10 minutes until your charge nurse sends you on break so you can eat the nutritious lunch you packed. You will gain weight....

Not only that, it's hard physical labor a lot of the time. Pushing a wheelchair isn't that hard. Pushing a stretcher with a 300lb patient on it is considerably more difficult but it's not horrible. It's moving their whole body that's the work. Transferring an immobile patient from a stretcher to a CT bed, rolling them so you can place a bedpan, boosting them up in bed, that's when the real work begins...and the real work gets a head of steam when you have to roll a 300lb patient and keep them rolled so you can spend 10 minutes wiping up their BM from their bottom, back and thighs, then strip their bed, wipe it down, and replace the linens - that's hard. You will most likely have to do it more than once. And maybe you'll do it while you're wearing a plastic gown that traps your body heat and a plastic face mask and two pairs of nitrile gloves, so you'll sweat too.

Add in the fact that there's never enough hands to help you. If you think a nurse has their CNA's do all this then you haven't worked in a hospital. CNA's are hard to find, they're most likely working with another nurse or patient, and the floors never staff enough of them because if something doesn't get done, it's on the nurse's license, not the hospital, not the CNA's, so administration knows that stuff will get done no matter what because nurses are terrified of losing their license.

Let us not forget that the US is a litigious society. Something goes wrong and it's likely you'll get called into court. Nurses are routinely told in nursing school that it's not "if" you're subpoenaed but "when". This is true. You will testify someday, no matter how hard you chart, no matter how good you think you are. I was called to testify twice in just a few years and, even though I, personally, wasn't defending anything, I still had a lot of stress.

Then there's your coworkers. They are probably some of the hardest working people you will ever meet, but they are also under a lot of stress and time pressure. Ever had to decide whether you need to pee more than someone needs medication? Ever had to figure out how you were going to hold down a three year old so you can start an IV while he screams bloody murder, and do it in less than five minutes because you have another patient who is moaning in pain, and a third patient is shouting obscenities and pounding on the locked door of his room because he is schizophrenic and having a bad night? This kind of stress leads to coworkers backbiting, sniping, complaining, gossiping and the like because they all have their own patients who are doing the same damn thing and not enough resources to go around.

So, yes, nursing sounds like a great job but there's stuff no one tells you. Lots of nurses leave the profession in their first year after graduation, even after they've taken all the prerequisites, and done their two years of nursing school, and gotten a job, and are still paying off their student loans. They just... quit and don't go back because it's a shitty way to earn a living. Literally.