Welcome to The Pre-PA Club. I'm Savanna Perry, PA-C, and this is where it all starts.

In this first episode I'm introducing myself and telling you why this show exists. I talk about how I landed on PA instead of medical school, what my path through school actually looked like, and how all of that turned into The PA Platform.

There's a lot of confusing, contradictory advice floating around about getting into PA school. My goal here is to give you straight answers in one place.

What I cover:

Why I chose PA over medical school

My background and how I got through PA school

How The PA Platform started and who it's for

Why shadowing and healthcare experience carry so much weight on your application

What you can expect from this podcast going forward

Resources mentioned:

Just getting started? Grab my free application timeline so you know what to do and when: https://www.thepaplatform.com/services/free-application-timeline

Not sure which programs fit your stats? The PA Program Map lays out requirements side by side: https://www.thepaplatform.com/pa-platform-map

Want to talk through your plan one-on-one? Book a pre-PA counseling session: https://www.thepaplatform.com/services/pre-pa-counseling

Have a question you want answered on the show? Send it my way. And if this helped you, leave a review. I actually read them.

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.

First of all, I want to say thank you so much for listening and giving my podcast a chance. If we've never met before, I'm Savannah and I'm going to try to make this as smooth as possible, but it is my first time, so bear with me.

I have been listening to podcasts for a very, very long time about all different subjects. And one day I decided to search for PA podcast.

There were a few that were targeting PA students and studying for boards, which is awesome and something I definitely need and need to brush up on off often. But I saw that there were no podcasts or consistent podcasts for Pre PA students.

One of the things that I love about podcasts is that you can listen while you're doing something else.

So I tend to listen to podcasts while I'm cleaning or driving or even sometimes when I'm in the shower or putting on my makeup, getting ready in the morning, I love to be learning about something and kind of getting my brain going while I may be doing another task that I don't enjoy as much, such as cleaning. So that's where the podcast comes in, and I'm really excited about it.

So if you don't know, I run a website called the PA Platform, and I've been doing that for a little over two years now. With my website, I've been able to do weekly blog posts, monthly newsletters, monthly webinars, and just putting a lot of information out there.

I kind of transitioned into being a Pre PA coach, which is really cool.

But ultimately, I just love being a PA and I love the profession, and I think it is something that needs more recognition and more people to know about it. So. So that's where this podcast comes in, because I want to help future PAs develop and reach their goals and become the best they can.

So I will tell you a little bit about my expectations for this podcast, and then for this very first episode, I'm just going to tell you about myself a little bit, about my journey and my story, and let you get to know me a little bit and see if you want to stick with me. So my goals for this podcast are I plan on doing weekly episodes.

I have a lot of topics I want to cover, but if there's something in particular that you would like to hear about, I would love to hear from you. You can always Email me, reach out on the website. There's a contact form there, and that's www.thepaplatform.com.

And then if you go to the paplatform.com, there's actually an option where you can record a voice memo if you would like that to be included in an upcoming episode for other people to hear your question and hear my answer. So that's what my plan is right now. We'll see what it evolves into. And tell me what you like. Tell me what you don't like.

I would love to know what you want to hear more of. So definitely open to ideas at this point. So a little bit about myself. Like I said, I'm Savannah.

I am currently a dermatology pa. Let's take it back a little bit and we'll get there. But I learned about the PA profession when I was in high school. I knew probably senior year is when I really started thinking about my future.

And I knew I liked science. I knew I kind of liked medicine, had an interest in healthcare, but I wasn't really sure what that meant.

And so this is the time when I'm trying to decide what college I want to go to, what I want to study, what I want to major in, all those fun things. So one day my dad actually went to a doctor's appointment. He was just sick, had a cold.

He came home and he was so excited because he had actually been seen by someone called a pa. And so in my family, we tend to research things a lot. And he actually had a whole folder printed out with all of the information he could find on the Internet about the PA profession.

Go Bulldogs. And I declared myself a biology major. I felt like as a biology major, that would leave my options open for the different choices I was considering.

And at this point, that was about everything. I still, still had PA in the back of my mind.

I was looking at nursing and nurse practitioner and nurse anesthetist, medical school, dental school, occupational therapy, physical therapy, dentistry, even teaching. I was thinking maybe I could just teach biology. Would I like that? And so during that whole freshman year at uga, I did a lot of soul searching.

And some of that involved tears and not so fun times.

But I think during that first year, I was able to find myself a little bit and really get focused on what my goals were, what my interests were, and figure out how I was going to fit in to this healthcare world. So I'm taking difficult classes, chemistry, calculus, organic chemistry, biology, and still trying to make these decisions.

And at the end of the day, or I guess the end of the year, I still wasn't quite sure, but I was leaning towards the physician assistant profession. So I decided to do some shadowing. So the summer in between my freshman and sophomore year is when I spent a lot of time shadowing.

And I think this definitely those experiences definitely solidified my decision to become a pa. I was able to shadow a PA who worked as basically a hospitalist and she also did some wound care and so she would travel between hospitals.

It was really cool seeing her interact with the doctor and just bounce ideas off of each other to make sure their patients were getting the best care possible. And to me it seemed like she was making so many decisions for the patients while involving them, but she was very hands on.

It wasn't like she was just in the background and her patients liked her and knew her and she was interacting with not only her supervising physician, but the nurses and the other physicians. And it was really cool to see that teamwork in action. So coming back into sophomore year, I was excited.

I knew that becoming a PA was going to be my goal. Now at this time, just to give you another little background, I was dating a really great guy who was also a biology major.

And yes, we were that annoying couple who were in all the same classes. We were always lab partners. I always say that he helped me pass and I helped him remember to turn in assignments on time.

But he had decided that he was kind of between dentistry and medical school. And then he basically decided towards the end of freshman year that he was going to go for medical school. So that was his goal.

My goal was PA school, but we were taking all the same classes. So I think that was a really great support system. But my point is that I was seeing both sides.

I was seeing what was going into priority preparing for medical school while I was trying to figure out what went into preparing for PA school. Now again, this was a while back and there were not a ton of resources, which fast forward is why I ended up creating the PA platform.

So I'm trying to kind of fix that. But luckily there are a lot more resources now.

So I'm going through undergrad, I'm shadowing, I did not have any certifications or any way to get healthcare experience. I totally regret not doing the high school program where I could have gotten my CNA license. Big mistake on my part.

But I decided to go ahead and get my CNA license while I was in college. So this consisted of me enrolling in a program that was about an hour away from Athens, Georgia towards Atlanta.

And I would go every Saturday for three months to my CNA class. It was all day long. And then my spring break was when the clinicals were.

And it was funny because there were two other girls in my class who were pre PA and now both of them are RPA's. So we would go and it was definitely an interesting experience. I just respect cnas so much because it is such hard work.

After I got my certification that next summer, I worked full time at a rehabilitation hospital. Also a really awesome experience. I loved the neurology and brain trauma unit.

I thought it was really neat seeing those patients improve and kind of working with them.

But I worked as a CNA and so I was just helping patients with activities of daily living, with feedback, feeding, bathing, toileting, all different stuff. And I enjoyed it. But again, it was such hard work. And so going back to school, I knew I couldn't continue to do well in courses and work full time.

So I did not pursue getting a job at that point. And that was when I was trying to tackle organic chemistry, which is awful.

I mean, yeah, it was almost the death of me, but I did some hospice volunteering, continued to shadow, and then just knowing myself. I really wanted to be able to go straight into PA school if possible from my undergrad.

I know that doesn't work for everyone and we'll definitely talk about gap years, but for me, I was ready to work. I was ready to. I didn't want to take a big break from school and kind of get out of that school school mode.

So I did start applying to PA programs this summer in between my junior and senior year. My stats were okay. I don't think they were anything that amazing. My overall GPA was a 3.6. My science was around a 3.58.

And I had around 300 hours of healthcare experience. Not that much, about 150 hours of shadowing. I think I had some great letters of recommendation from PAs and from supervisors. And I did.

Looking back, I think my personal statement was pretty good. I'll be sharing that on my website soon. But I do think that helped with getting me into PA school. But. So I decided to apply again.

This is in between junior and senior year and I applied to the four schools in Georgia. This was My plan, I would really wanted to stay in state.

Ideally, I wanted to go to what was then known as the Medical College of Georgia and is now Augusta University because my, like I said, my boyfriend, who would then become my fiance and is now my husband, was applying to the Medical College of Georgia. And ideally we wanted to be in the same place.

It also, being a state school was significantly cheaper than any of the other programs because they were private. So I applied to these four programs. Now, the thing was, I was only actually qualified for two of them.

Mercer was nice enough to reach out and say, hey, any chance that you would have 1,000 hours by the time you would start in January? And I said, nope. And then I got another rejection letter. But I was kind of expecting that.

My thoughts there were, if I had to reapply, I would reapply or I would come in as a re applicant and be able to show them how I'd improved and show them how devoted I was to becoming a PA and how much I wanted to go to their school. I don't know if that's the best plan, but I do still recommend that in some cases, if it's somewhere that you really want to go.

So then I ended up, I did take the GRE because that was required for these programs. But I ended up getting an interview invite to the Medical College of Georgia, which was my first choice.

And I was in their very first interview group, which felt awesome. So I didn't get much notice. About a week and a half, I had to skip a test and make that up later. So that wasn't fun.

I think it was a biochemistry test. And I went to the interview. We'll talk all about that later, too. It was a great experience.

And then the waiting began, or more waiting, which is awful. It's so stressful just waiting to hear from schools. About that time, I got another interview invite to South University in Savannah, which.

Savannah is such a beautiful town, I would not have been super upset to go there, but I went to the interview at South. It was a two day interview and I actually ended up getting a call. I finished up my interview the second day.

My mom was with me and we went downtown to have lunch and do a little shopping. And about 30 minutes after I left the interview, I got a call from the Medical College of Georgia that I had been accepted.

So it was kind of a wasted interview, but great experience and I was so excited. A couple weeks later, I did get an acceptance letter from south, which I turned down. I hope someone awesome took my spot.

But I was so excited to be starting PA school. It kind of worked out that I graduated a semester early. That wasn't on purpose. I just.

Part of UGA's major requirements for biology didn't include anatomy and physiology. Those counted as electives for me. So I had basically eight extra hours that I ended up taking. And I'd come in with a few credits, not too many.

And it just kind of worked out. So I was able to graduate a semester early in December. My program started in May. I did have a few months off.

I just kind of hung out in Athens, went to classes with some of my friends, and I worked a little bit here or there, but I was. I'm glad I had that time off, but I think I would have been just as fine going straight in.

And we had plenty of people in our program who just started straight from undergrad. Some of them even only had maybe a week in between graduation and starting PA School. I had an awesome experience at Augusta University.

I loved PA school. I met some of my best friends ever, and I feel like I had got a really great education there.

Their program was 27 months, so I was in school for about, I would say, two years in a summer straight through. And then I graduated and I started looking for a job before graduation. I can tell you guys more about that story later.

But I ended up going into dermatology. I loved surgery. I love dermatology. And I had done a lot of shadowing in dermatology.

And I know people think it's boring and just acne and old people, but it's really not. There's really cool stuff, a lot of rashes. I get to do some cosmetic stuff now, which I love. And I. I really do love my job.

I've been there for three years now and hopefully I don't ever have to leave. But it was about, gosh, how long had I been there? I've been there about six months. When I started about started thinking about doing the PA platform.

And I have to give my husband credit for the name. He came up with it because I was drawing a blank.

But I decided to create a website and a resource for people who had been where I had been, trying to find answers and looking for information on how to achieve their goals when it's not always readily available. So that's where the website was born. And then it's just kind of grown from there.

And I've been so amazed by the support it's gotten and how the emails I get from people who have been helped by the website just make me smile and make me want to keep doing it.

So my husband is now in residency as a physician, and while he's busy at the hospital doing whatever he does there, I work on my website and I write blog posts. And I just really like showing you guys what it's like to be a PA and giving my advice on how you can also become a pa.

So that's a little bit about me. I would love to hear about you.

If you would like to send me an email and just let me know where you're at, what stage in the process you're at, and what your goals are, I would love that. And I think that's about it for my first episode. I hope you stuck with me and if you did, thank you so much.

I hope to give you a lot more information in the coming weeks and years. And again, I'm open to questions and just really want this to be a resource for you and whatever you need it to be.

So feel free to reach out and then if you stick around and you listen and you like it, feel free or please, I guess I'm begging, give me a review on itunes so that other PA students can find out about it or hopeful PA students. And I think that's it. Thank you so much.

And if you want to know more and want to get more information, definitely go to the PA platform.com and I'll actually link a video where you can see my story about how I've how I became a PA and hear a little bit more about that if you go to the paplatform.com podcast1 so check that out and stay tuned for the next episode every Friday coming at you. Thanks for listening. I just wanted to quickly mention a sponsor of the podcast, MyPA Resource.

If you've never heard of MyPA Resource, it's a website www.myparesource.com and while I offer services like mock interviews, I work with mypa Resource as a personal statement editor.

So mypa Resource has been around for a while now and I would say just based on everything that's out there, they are the most trusted and most thorough prepa personal statement editing service. So with my PA Resource, like I said, I'm an editor, so I help them edit proofread personal statements for PA school applicants.

We'll talk more about personal statements in the future.

But I cannot stress the importance of having your essay proofread by a PA. And that's what makes my PA resource different, is that they only use PAs to do their editing. And so you want a PA who's familiar with the interview process and the application process before you submit to caspa.

So all the editors, we've been trained, we do a lot of essays, and we know what to look for, and we know what the admissions committees are looking for. And so I know when I edit, it's very thorough. I mean, you're gonna get a lot of read back, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

So you can use actually a discount code that they have provided to the Pre Pa Club podcast listeners exclusively, and you can get $15 off any service when you use the code Prepa Club, all in lowercase. So I'll put that in the description as well. And if you have any questions about that, please feel free to reach out to me.

You can send them an email, too. But yeah, a great resource that I want you guys to know about.