Objective: Nursing students must voluntarily choose the nursing profession and be motivated to have a positive attitude toward the profession. The study aimed to evaluate the relationship between nursing students’ attitudes toward their profession and their career choice and motivations.

Methods: The study included 302 nursing students studying at a state university in Turkey between December 2018 and January 2019. The data were collected using the data collection form, attitude scale for nursing profession, the scale of nurse career choice, motivation sources, and problems scale. Descriptive statistics, independent t-test, Mann-Whitney U test, One-Way analysis of variance test, Kruskal-Wallis test, and Pearson’s and Spearman’s correlation coefficients were used for data analysis.

Results: The mean age of the participants was 21.1±1.6 years, and 87.4% of them were women. A statistically significant difference was found among the class levels and attitudes toward the nursing profession, properties of nursing profession, prefer for nursing profession, nurse career choice, occupational compliance, vital causes, and negative motivation (p<0.05). A statistically significant difference was found between gender and attitudes toward the nursing profession, properties of nursing profession, prefer for nursing profession, general position of nursing profession, occupational compliance, motivation, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and negative motivation (p<0.05). A statistically significant positive correlation was found between attitudes toward the nursing profession and the following factors: nurse career choice, occupational compliance, motivation, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and negative motivation (p<0.05).

Conclusion: According to this study, it was concluded that nurse career choice and motivation positively affected nursing students’ attitudes toward the nursing profession.