The single biggest CASPA surprise: your GPA is probably not what you think it is.

CASPA counts every course you've taken. That class you retook? Both grades count. The semester you'd rather forget from your first year of college? Still in there. Your school might replace grades, but CASPA doesn't.

And once your application is verified, that GPA is locked for the cycle. Retaking a class in July doesn't change what programs see. So calculate it before you apply, not after.

I also go through GRE score reporting and how letters of recommendation move through the system, because both cause avoidable delays every single year.

What I cover:

• How CASPA calculates your GPA and what counts
• Retaken courses and grade replacement
• Why verified GPAs don't get recalculated mid-cycle
• Getting GRE scores to the right places
• How letters of recommendation are submitted and tracked
• Knowing your real numbers before you apply

Resources:

CASPA GPA calculator: https://www.thepaplatform.com/pa-school-caspa-gpa-calculator

Free application timeline: https://www.thepaplatform.com/services/free-application-timeline

PA Program Map: https://www.thepaplatform.com/pa-platform-map

Pre-PA counseling: https://www.thepaplatform.com/services/pre-pa-counseling

Mentioned in this episode:

CapYear Training

Get $200 Off CapYear Academy Looking to boost your clinical experience this summer? CapYear Academy offers a flexible, 100% online medical assistant training program with optional externships and CCMA certification included. 🎓 Use code PA200 for $200 off your tuition! 👉 Enroll now at capyear.co

Welcome to the Pre PA Club Podcast.

In today's episode, we're going to do an intro and revisit why I became a PA and also go over some just basics you need to know about Caspa.

Welcome to the Pre PA Club Podcast.

If you want to learn how to become a physician assistant, you're in the right place.

I'm your host, Savannah Perry.

Let's get to it.

Hey, guys.

Welcome to the podcast.

First of all, I want to apologize for my terrible voice.

I don't know if you can tell, but I have laryngitis and I sound super raspy and not like myself.

So if that annoys you, I'm so sorry.

I can't really help it.

But hopefully next week my voice will be back to normal, but.

Or I'll just record things more in advance when my voice sounds normal.

But that is life.

So I have an Instagram TV video that I'm going to be posting about.

Just a quick little intro and going back over why I became a pa.

So if you're kind of new to the podcast, new to following the PA platform, I'm going to pop that in so that you can hear it with my normal voice and just get to know me a little bit better and see kind of how I ended up here.

But before we get to that, I do want to mention mypa Resource and PA School Prep, who both sponsor the podcast, and those are services that are specifically for people who want to become PAs.

So myparesource.com is a personal statement editing service and PA School Prep is a course that helps you prepare for the Anatomy, Physiology and med terms portion of PA School.

So check both of those out.

The links are in the description and you can use the code futurepa for a discount on services at those websites and also@the PA platform or prepacourses.com.

So if you are in interview season, we have the PA School Interview Guide and then the PA School Interview Course.

Now I have been getting some questions about what's the difference?

So the material is just presented differently.

And so in the book, I'm able to go over more questions in depth and really dive into, you know, kind of breaking down thoughts on how to answer those.

Whereas in the course, I'm able to explain and actually show you techniques better by kind of going through answers and you'll hear it.

So if you're a reader, you may enjoy the book.

If you are somebody, somebody who likes to interact a little bit more, you may enjoy the course where you're able to see it and hear it, they complement each other very well.

There's just some information that can't really be put in book form, and then there's stuff in the book that can't really.

I can't go through everything in the course, or it would be 100 hours and not practical.

So if you have any questions about that, feel free to reach out.

But I'll pop in my intro, and then after my intro, I'm gonna go over just things that I feel like questions I'm seeing a lot about CASPA and things that I feel like you need to know about it, whether you're applying this cycle or next cycle or in the future, but just basics that can kind of maybe slow down your process or be kind of negative and make things bad for you.

So try to make that a little bit easier.

But we'll go over those in just a second.

Hey, guys.

I wanted to do an intro for Instagram tv, since I've never done that before.

And if you're new to following or have been following for a while and not really sure who you're following.

Hey, I'm Savannah Perry.

I am a dermatology PA in Georgia, and I've been doing this for five years now.

But I want to talk a little bit about my journey to becoming a PA and why I pursued the PA profession and what has kind of gotten me to this point.

So, originally, when I was younger, I kind of always had somewhat of an interest in medicine.

My sister had a disease when she was little, and she still does, technically called fappa, which they think is an autoimmune disease.

But essentially she had really high fevers every single month, and no one really knew what was going on at the time.

It was a very new thing, not well researched, not very common.

And so that meant she went to a lot of doctors, she got a lot of blood draws, a lot of tests, and I was kind of just along for the ride, watching as her older sister.

So.

So while that wasn't fun for her, it did expose me to a lot of different doctors and ones who were great and really helpful and kind and went out of their way and took their time to really work on her case and ones who maybe weren't as kind or nice.

And so that started pushing me in the direction of working in medicine.

But it wasn't until high school, you know, when I really started thinking, what am I going to do with my life?

And I didn't really want to think about it that much.

But senior year, I was going to the University of Georgia.

I had decided I was gonna be a biology major.

Still not sure what I was gonna do with that.

So while I was in high school, my dad actually went to the doctor for a cold, ended up seeing a PA and kind of came home with all this information.

And so he came back with a huge folder of research for me, all about the PA profess.

If that tells you where I get my over researching from, it's from him.

And so I looked at it, I was kind of like, okay, that sounds interesting.

I'm not really concerned about this right now.

Thanks for the info.

But going into college and freshman year at uga, which is a huge school with lots of resources, but it can also be a little bit intimidating, I still just wasn't sure.

And I spent a lot of time looking into basically anything you can do with a biology major.

So that was, you know, being a teacher, an advisor, research, med school, dental school, penns school, ot, rt, nursing.

Really just anything in medicine or healthcare or science.

And so I took a lot of time that year kind of looking into things, struggling in some of my classes, and ultimately shadowing is what led me to my decision.

So I was able to shadow a PA and a doctor that together.

And that is what helped me make my decision.

That PA was awesome.

She knew what she was doing.

They did hospital and wound care medicine, and she was taking care of patients.

She was young.

She had gotten there pretty quickly, gone straight into school after undergrad, and I was kind of like, yes, I don't want to be in school for the rest of my life.

This is.

This is what is going to work for me.

So I did more shadowing, you know, starting my volunteer hours, taking classes or making sure I was taking the right ones, getting some patient care experience.

And by the end of freshman year, I was full on pa, which for me I still feel was the best choice.

So my husband, on the other hand, which was then boyfriend turned fiance turned husband, he was also a biology major.

We are that annoying couple who is always lab partners.

But he helped me a lot through some of those classes, like chemistry.

And I made sure he got assignments turned in on time, but he was going the med school route.

And so we basically took the same classes.

He did not have to take anatomy to apply to med school.

We both had to take some standardized tests.

He took the mcat.

I took the GRE much easier.

And then we both started school at the same time.

So I've been able to see the differences in schooling and training.

And yes, med school is definitely more in depth.

You learn a lot more, you revisit a lot of, you know, the biochemistry and physiology behind things a little bit more than you do in PA school.

And then you have residency.

So to give you a frame of reference, I've been working for five years as a PA and he just finished residency a couple months ago and he's now working as a hospitalist.

So here we are, he's 30, I'm almost 30, 30 years old and he's really just starting his career, whereas I feel like I've been pretty established in.

Mine for a while.

And to me that's a huge benefit of the PA profession as well as the flexibility and the desirability of PAs.

It's typically not too hard to find a job if you're kind of willing to work with some different factors and it's, if you have experience, it makes it even easier.

So recently I went to part time work and I had a new job within 24 hours of turning my resignation at my old job.

So I think the PA profession is continuing to grow.

I think there's such a great place for the PA profession.

We're not going to replace doctors.

Doctors are needed to, nurses are needed.

I mean, we all play a different role in health care, which I think we all have our own important role that we have to play.

But I've loved, love my job, love my decision and I'm happy to answer any questions that come up as far as what I do or pre PA stuff because in another life I would be a college advisor, which is where the PA platform came from and how I kind of live out that dream.

But I'm happy to help wherever I can.

Thanks for watching.

Alright, so that was the intro.

Hopefully that gives you a little more insights.

But now let's talk about caspa.

And I was trying to come up with like a number, you know, the five things you need to know about caspa, but I really couldn't because once I start talking about this, I tend to think about new things and that I feel like I need to also talk about.

But there are a few main things.

So in our pre PA club Facebook group I'm seeing some, some questions that just keep popping up over and over and honestly they pop up every single cycle.

And so I just want, I think the more you hear the information, the more it's reiterated, the more likely you are to kind of understand it.

All right, so the first thing has to do with GPAs and all of this is explained in the CASPA FAQ that they have online.

And I highly recommend reading through the entire thing.

I think it is worth your time, but it can still be a little bit confusing until you're actually doing it.

So with gpa, which is what everyone tends to be concerned about, CASPA calculates a bunch of different GPAs, like a whole page worth.

The main ones that you need to be concerned with are your overall and your science gpa.

I'll put a link in the description to a blog post I did a while back called what is my CASPA gpa?

Where you can I kind of break down how they calculate it.

So with these GPAs, the main thing that I want to emphasize is that every single grade from every course you've ever taken goes into these GPAs.

No courses are average.

So if you took chemistry three times, they don't average those grades together.

They just count them all in those calculations.

So does that average them?

Kind of, but not really.

So it's not like if you got an A, a C and a B, they're going to consider you having a B.

No, they're going to see you took it three times and you got an a B and a C. Most schools are going to take that highest grade into consideration.

There are a few that will say we want your initial attempt and that's what we're looking at.

But that's not common.

So every grade goes into those GPA calculations.

Now, CASPA does not calculate your GPAs until you've submitted your application.

So will you know what your CASPA GPAs are before you submit?

No, you will not.

Once you've submitted and it's been verified and they go through all of your coursework, that's when those GPAs are calculated and you'll be able to go back into your application and see see that.

Now, for a lot of people, what ends up happening is that your CASPA GPA is less than what you expected.

It may be different than the GPA that's on your transcripts, because if you did repeat courses, a lot of schools, like universities, will not include that first attempt in their calculations.

And so this can be a shock to a lot of people.

And that's why I do recommend trying to figure out, if you can, what those GPAs are ahead of time.

In that blog post, I have a link to a GPA calculator where you can plug in your grades.

We can do this for you.

At the PA platform, we have a pre PA assessment option where we Do GPA only and try to estimate that for you with an interactive Excel document.

But if it, just don't be surprised if your GPAs are different and most likely lower every once in a while they're higher, and that's awesome.

But a lot of times that is a rude awakening for a lot of people.

And it may take you out of consideration for some programs if you're really close to, say that 3.0 mark.

So that's number one with GPAs.

The number two thing with GPAs is after your GPAs have been verified once, they will not be verified again during that cycle.

Let me try to explain this.

So if you.

Let's say that you're currently taking classes and your semester is about to end, but you've already submitted your application because you wanted to get it in for schools that had, like, a July or August deadline.

But you're thinking that if you wait for other schools that have a later deadline, you can submit these courses and it will boost your GPA.

That's not how it works.

Those GPAs that come up and your initial application will be the ones that are calculated and sent to the schools.

And if you add, it doesn't matter how much new coursework you add, they will not be recalculated this cycle.

Next cycle they would be.

But that's something if you have not applied this cycle or you're applying in the future to really keep in mind, especially when it comes to, like, spring courses and summer courses.

Because, yeah, CASPA opens in April, but if you submit in April and you're waiting for that spring semester to finish up, those courses won't be verified and those grades won't show up, and they won't be included in your GPAs.

Some schools will allow you to send them an update and say, hey, I completed this course, and take that into consideration.

And some schools will not.

They strictly go by what's on your CASPA application.

So that's really important because that, again, messes up a lot of people.

And I see this over and over coming up in the Facebook group and the discussions.

Okay.

Another thing about caspa, so another question that I'm getting is about GRE scores and what carries over.

So remember that anything, hypothetically, anything that you enter will carry over, as long as it's not a letter of recommendation or your personal statement.

Letters of recommendation have to be submitted every single cycle, and your personal statement has to be entered every cycle.

If you've sent a GRE score to a specific.

Because each school has their own code for a specific school.

If you've sent your transcript, if you've entered experience, hypothetically, that should all be there.

Every once in a while there are issues and either CASP has to reset something and it all gets lost.

So you can't bank on that.

And that shouldn't be the only place you have your information.

But usually things carry over.

CASPA does not currently use anything like interfolio to save letters.

And so that's something to take into consideration too.

And those letters have to come directly from the letter writers.

They cannot come from you.

And they're submitted electronically.

I've written letters for people and it comes, there's like a little sign in thing that you sign into and then you have to answer some questions on a scale about the person, just about kind of their work ethic and whether you recommend them.

And then you upload the letter and it's sent into caspa.

You can add more programs if you want to apply to more programs after your initial submission and you can add more experiences.

So if you are getting additional hours, have switched jobs or shadowing more, volunteering more, you cannot edit an old entry for experience, but you can add a new one and that will get sent out to the programs as an update.

Whether or not they look at that is going to be program specific.

So you may want to shoot them a separate update and let them know that you are still working towards this goal and also that you're still available and that you are ready and willing to come in for an interview.

Something that is new on the PA platform that I'll link to in the description is the PA programs map.

So if you go to the PA platform.com physician assistant programs with an S map, it's a lot easier just to go to the link or to go to the website.

If you go to the PA platform.com it's on the homepage.

But if you go there you will see see that we have a map now that's interactive, that has every state and every program listed.

Right now it just has their contact information.

We're slowly going to be adding more info as people tell us what they think is going to be most helpful.

But that makes it super easy for you to find the email address, the phone number if you need to get an email address.

And we're adding the links to the programs today.

So that is a tool that you can use just to reach out to those schools and give them those updates if you need to.

I think those are the main basics that I've been seeing issues with as far as CASPA goes right now, but if there's something else or you feel like we need another Casper focused episode, please let me know.

We've done some CASPA episodes in the past, but if there's something more specific that you feel like we need to talk about and go into more detail with, please, please don't hesitate to let me know.

I'm happy to do that.

And I have some interviews coming up for you guys, which I'm excited about and hopefully my voice will be better next week.

But if anybody has any questions or issues, please feel free to reach out on instagram @the PA platform.

And if you've been a listener to the podcast for a while, I would really appreciate if you could leave us a review.

Maybe don't mention how terrible my voice sounds, but if you could on itunes and we're working on getting it the podcast on other platforms.

So if there's somewhere else you want to hear the podcast, please let me know.

But we are working on that and I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback and yeah, so thanks so much for tuning in and I will see you guys next week.