Can you become a tertiary for an order and then enter at a future date into that same order as a fully professed nun, or can you only be one or the other?
Yes, you can go from a tertiary to a fully professed Nun, Brother or Priest (depending on your sex).
My 5th grade teacher did exactly that. he was a Dominican Tertiary at the time, one of 2 lay teachers in a school run by Dominican Sisters. He went to seminary when he was in his 30’s, and became a Dominican Priest.
Can you become a tertiary for an order and then enter at a future date into that same order as a fully professed nun, or can you only be one or the other?
The simple answer is yes, although you would need to be dispensed from the private vows (or similar) taken as a tertiary before you could enter formation as a nun. This is both for solid canonical reasons (you cannot easily live two separate states within the church simultaneously) and also a reminder that tertiary membership of a religious order is in itself an important vocation with significant implications that must be properly respected. But so long as one is accepted for formation by appropriate authority when application is made to be a tertiary, and later to be a religious, the change in state is entirely possible.
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