I have been down this road as well!!! I was reading your post, and I felt I was reading about myself a few yrs ago!! Here's what I know...
To be a nurse practitioner, you have to go get your bachelor's in nursing and become a licensed RN. Then you have to work in the field for a couple of years and then go back to school and get into a nurse practitioner program...This will last about 2 yrs depending on which school you go to.
Or you could do Nurse anesthetist. They make roughly $120,000 per year, but I'm sure this number is much higher in a place like New York. For this, you have to get your bachelor's in nursing and licensed as RN. Then you work in the field for a year or two, then go back for training as a nurse anesthetist for 2-3 yrs.
You could also go to PA school to become a physician's assistant. To do this, you would get your bachelor's degree in whatever you want and make sure to take the prerequisites for PA school...They like for you to have a couple of years working in the medical field doing whatever...medical assistant, EMT, etc. After your bachelor's you would go to PA school for approximately two years, and you're done! PAs are taught in a medical model meaning that they are taught to diagnose and treat instead of the nursing model like NPs...
http://www.aapa.org/geninfo1.html
You can go online to
www.salary.com to get a good estimate of how much each of the different jobs earn.
As far as becoming a doctor is concerned, send me a pm and I'll give you a website that I like to visit. I have decided to become a physician, but I still have a ways to go.
To become a doctor, as I'm sure you know, you need your bachelor's degree in anything, and need very high grades in prereq's. It is also important to get exposure to the medical field through volunteering at a hospital or even working at one if you can. MCAT needs to be taken the spring the year before you apply to medical school. In order to do well on it, you should have taken 1 yr of biology with labs, 1 yr of general chemistry with labs, 1 yr of organic chemistry with labs, 1 yr of physics with labs, 1 yr of calculus with labs, and some schools require statistics. Also, ExamKrackers is a good book to use to prepare for it.
If you are accepted to medical school, the first two years are typically in class/lab, and the next two years are rotations in different fields of medicine. At the beginning of the 4th year, I believe, you have to do the residency matching program...You have to make a list of where you want to do your residency and in which field. That school/hospital has to pick you as well...If not, then you don't match. I don't know how to explain it intelligently, so you can read more about it on aamc.org or
http://www.nrmp.org/
So, basically, you are not guaranteed to get in the program that you want...Dermatology amongst a few others are the toughest to get into, and you need high scores on USMLE and rotations.