When you become a CNA, look around you and see if you are interested in what you see the nurses doing. Then, consider if you want to go back to school for several more years to do that. If you wanted to do a direct entry NP program, you could do that, but those still involve going to part of the program to be able to obtain an RN license that you don't plan on using. To me that's a waste of time and energy. Might as well just become a PA if your goal is to practice as a provider as soon as you can. But then you have to factor in prerequisites for both paths.
I wanted to keep my debt nearly nonexistent, so I became a nurse at a community college, and am now working towards becoming an NP. I have no debt and make pretty decent money that puts me squarely middle class wage-wise if I do nothing but go to work 3 shifts per week. I do consider myself lucky to be able to work as much as I want when I feel like I need to, and I've done that from time to time when I wanted to take my wife on a trip, or buy an expensive item, or start a project at my house. My first year working as a nurse, I hit overtime and extra shifts hard and banked nearly $40k extra, above and beyond my wages. If you are wondering how much of a bite taxes take out if overtime, I'll tell you that it took a lot out of it, even after sticking close to an accountant. I hoped to average 2 extra shifts per week, and much of the time got lucky with callback perks and ended up getting paid time and a half for half my shifts many weeks, which made it so I didn't need to pull 5 day workweeks. That was because my 3 day scheduled workweek was at the end of the week, and I'd pick up extra shifts on days before my prior shift started, and sometimes I'd be in overtime before I even started my scheduled shifts. This wasn't all for the money, it was mostly because I wanted to learn as much as I could as a new nurse. It worked, and set me up well. It also would burn me out to do that every year. In fact, I don't think I'll ever do that kind of thing again, because the payoff after taxes really didn't make up for some of the things I'll have to give up coming down the line. I'm not interested in being the husband that is never around. But for that year, I was learning a lot and making lots of money, and paying lots of taxes. I also became a supervisor much quicker than I would have otherwise, which increased the bottom line enough to make a cruddy position bearable.
So I've mentioned the good things... Probably the best things about nursing to an outsider. The job itself is hard, unforgiving, and often thankless, so if you don't posses some sort of ability to derive self satisfaction from what you do, it's unlikely that anyone else will step up and provide you any accolades for your work. At the worst, people in hospitals are having one of their more terrible day ever, and even if someone is having a great day, they are still sleeping in a bed that isn't their own. So you can expect nobody is very concerned about how you feel vs how they themselves feel. But if you can appreciate being selfless in a healthy way (many nurses feed off of being savior in an unhealthy way), then dabble in nursing for a while before you go on to something else. But if you want to use it as a stepping stone for something else, be warned that you'll have a hard time with nursing duties if all you want is to leave it as soon as possible. It would be pretty miserable to do what nurses do regularly, knowing that it's not your thing. And as a CNA, you might be tempted to think that becoming a nurse means getting beyond CNA work, but the typical nurse ends up doing everything a CNA does, plus all the other stuff nurses do. At least that's the case with me. At the end of the day, I am responsible for all the necessary nursing care being completed, so that usually means I'll be right there changing patients and doing everything my CNA does, which sadly, even they don't seem to acknowledge either.
