CASPA just opened. Here's how to actually use it.

Opening day matters, but rushing a sloppy application out the door matters more, and not in a good way. I'm walking you through what to do first, what to slow down on, and the program-specific details that trip people up every single cycle.

What I cover:

• What CASPA is and how the centralized system works
• Why you should start early without submitting early and sloppy
• Getting your personal statement finished before you're under pressure
• Why every program still sets its own deadlines and requirements
• Researching program criteria so you don't get cut on a technicality
• Planning your timeline from opening day to submission

Resources:

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

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

Free personal statement worksheet: https://www.thepaplatform.com/services/free-personal-statement-worksheet-download

Have me review your essay: https://www.thepaplatform.com/services/pre-pa-essay-review

Welcome to episode 34 where we'll be talking all about CASPA today since it opened yesterday.

Alright, let's get to it.

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, this is Savannah here.

If we haven't met before, I am Savannah, the host of the Pre PA Club podcast and the founder of the PA platform.

And it's a really important week.

Does anyone know what week it is?

You probably should if you're applying to PA school.

What's the word?

Cycle.

Sorry, Pregnancy brain.

But yeah.

So CASPA is open for this cycle and I wish everyone the best of luck if you are applying this year and if I can help in any way, you can email me, DM me, whatever.

And if you haven't gotten started on your personal statement yet, definitely it's time.

You don't want to leave that to the last minute.

You want enough time to kind of revise, edit, fine tune that and have people read it.

If you are looking for someone who's a professional to read it, definitely check out myparesource.com that's who I edit for.

We only use PAs to edit.

We've edited a lot of essays looking for content, grammar, flow, making sure you're on the right track, making sure you're providing what the schools are looking for personal statement.

I mean that's what's going to get you the interview.

And so it's really, really important that it's as polished and good as possible and that it shows who you are.

You want it to be personal.

So anyway, you can use the code, the pre paclubypa resource.com to get a discount and they have a free workshop.

So if you don't know if you need help but you are having trouble getting started, that's something I see a lot like I don't know how to start.

There is a free video workshop at that website and then I have some free Downloads on the PA Platform.com Downloads that are worksheets to help you work through getting your personal statement started.

Okay, so to be perfectly honest, I was planning on doing this episode next week and I had a really awesome interview that I had done with Annalyn from Prescribing Health on Instagram.

But thanks to the wonderful nature of technology, my recording didn't work.

So I am extremely sad about that and hopefully I can Convince her to do an interview with me again because it was really good and she's awesome.

And if you have questions about the NHSC Scholar program, definitely reach out to her.

She's an internal medicine PA in Arizona and it was so fun talking to her.

So I'm hoping that either I can figure out how to recover that file or get her on again if possible.

But regardless, today we will talk about Caspa, which is relevant and important.

So yesterday on Instagram and in the pre PA Club Facebook group, I was answering tons of questions about caspa.

Now disclaimer.

I am not necessarily a CASPA expert.

I'm not the end all be all.

They have a great faq.

That's the first thing you should know.

And if you have any questions, check there first because usually it answers your questions and they are pretty good about support.

Now when it comes to their support, they will answer your questions about the technical stuff of caspa, but they are not going to answer your questions about requirements or things that are specific to different schools.

So if you're having like a glitch with something, you want to reach out to the CASPA support.

If you have questions about what a school accepts or anything like that, you need to reach out to the school directly.

So just keep that in mind because sometimes people get frustrated with caspa's somewhat short or non specific answers.

But they are strictly there as a software to make applying universal and easy.

So they are not affiliated with the programs.

They do not choose these things for the programs even when it comes to healthcare experience, patient care experience, categorizing that, they just have to give you guidelines.

But ultimately it's up to the programs how they are going to categorize your experience.

So just keep that in mind going into caspa.

But anyway, yeah, so I answered a lot of questions and I feel like a lot of people probably have those same questions.

And so today I just want to give you a bunch of tips and answer some of the most common questions I've seen as far as caspa.

This is saved or some of the questions are saved on my Instagram highlights and I'll definitely be continuing to answer questions as always.

You can email me, DM me on Instagram, whatever.

I'll put a link in the description as well to a webinar I did last year on Caspa just to help you kind of if you need like an overview and you just don't know where to start at all, you could probably start there and it's gonna break things down for you and Kind of help you to get to where you need to be if you just aren't sure at all.

So anyway, things to know about caspa.

Alright, so CASPA just opened, which means that for the most part you can apply to schools.

Some schools do not open yet, so there are schools that wait until June or July to open their application, even through caspa.

So for these schools, you may would have to submit your application to some schools early and then wait until the other schools you're interested in open and apply there.

So an example, Florida International University.

This is one someone asked me about yesterday because they were saying I'm not seeing on Caspa, but I know they use Caspa.

They don't open their application until June 15th, so then you'll be able to go in and add that program.

But then if you're going, oh my gosh, I wanted to submit June 1, what do I do?

You go ahead and submit to all the other programs and then come June 15th when it opens, you submit to the programs that you wanted to.

So just something to keep in mind there now, I guess if we're talking about CASPA opening, let's talk about CASPA closing.

So CASPA technically closes in March.

Now each school has their own deadlines and so that doesn't mean that you can apply anywhere you want until March.

If a school has an October 15th deadline at that point you're done.

You cannot enter or submit your application to them anymore.

So again, CASPA is just kind of a universal application website.

It's not program affiliated.

So make sure you're checking each program to see what their deadline is, whether or not they have rolling admissions, when you're making decisions about when you're going to apply.

Most programs use caspa, there are a few that do not.

And so just kind of keep that in mind.

It's becoming very, very few and far between the ones that don't use caspa.

But.

But the application process is going to be about the same.

You're going to have to enter the same types of information.

So it shouldn't be too difficult.

It's just an extra step of having to do it more than once when it comes to supplemental applications.

This is something I was getting questions about yesterday.

There are a few programs that are putting some of their supplemental questions into caspa and this is something you want to think about when you're choosing how many programs to apply to.

If you apply to 50 programs, can you actually complete 50 supplementals and pay for them?

That's a lot of money.

So Just think about that when you're choosing programs and make sure that you're allowing enough time to adequately address the essays involved and do the work involved because you don't want to waste your time or money applying somewhere that you're not going to be able to complete the application.

So think about that.

And some supplemental.

Like I said, the questions may be in caspa.

Some of them may be separate, some may be through the program's website and you do it independently.

Some programs will wait until they get your CASPA application and decide if they want you to do a supplemental and send it to you.

Each program is different.

I'm probably going to say that 100 times this episode, but each program is different.

So you kind of have to check and see what their requirements are.

I mentioned costs a little bit just a minute ago.

Cost.

So it is expensive to apply to PA school.

The first program that you apply to.

Let me make sure that I have the most, my most updated numbers here, but I think I should the first program that you apply to, you pay more and then from there each additional program is more.

So this year the first program is $179 and each additional program is $52.

That does not include the supplemental fees that the programs require.

So one thing to know is that there are some fee waivers available and I posted on Instagram about this last week and that fee waiver, if you qualify, waives that additional that initial $179 fee.

So to get a fee waiver, you have to submit tax documents.

If you claim yourself, you submit your tax documents.

If you're still on your parents taxes, you must submit their documents and you have to fall into a certain income range.

And then the most important thing is from the time that you apply for a fee waiver, you must submit your application within two weeks for it to be valid.

If you aren't ready to submit, don't apply for a fee waiver because it's going to expire.

The fee waivers tend to be in effect until around June, July, and then they run out because there are a limited number.

So that's something that if you want to go for it, try for it.

That's awesome.

May save you some money.

It's not going to hurt to try if you meet the requirements.

So something a little tip there.

One thing I just want to mention is with CASPA opening, please don't feel rushed to get your application in like today or tomorrow.

I mean it's great if you can and if you're prepared to do that, but please don't rush because what's gonna end up happening is you may not fully review your application.

You may end up with some typos and some errors, and that does not look good.

So you really need to take the time to review your application multiple times, double, triple check it to make sure that you are doing everything correctly.

And so just.

It is still very early.

I think there gets to be this kind of just struggle to get your application in as soon as possible, which is good.

But what is early?

So I would say May, June is still pretty early.

I used to think July, August was early.

But after working with people and getting hearing their feedback from programs and talking to programs, there are some programs out there who are filling all their interview spots by June.

So you may want to kind of look at that.

One way to check on that is to use physicianassistantforum.com It's a great website, basically discussion boards that have information from students in other programs or students who are applying.

So you go to the program and you can look back on previous cycles and kind of see when someone submitted and what the outcome was.

So if they're saying, I submitted in August and I didn't hear anything back, I have great stats, nothing happened.

I was told that they had already filled their interview spots.

Then you know that you need to apply before August if you want a chance.

So that's one way to kind of try to gauge that a little bit.

And the thing about applying early is it's.

It's just in your best interest.

To a degree, you have to weigh every part of your application.

But that is not to say that people who apply in September or October don't get accepted, because they do.

But you have to compare the strength of your application and really look at that.

Because if you, let's say you're taking classes and you need those classes to bring your science GPA up to a 3.0 and they're not going to be done until June 15th, then you wouldn't want to submit until after those courses are done because you need them to make yourself more competitive.

If you're sitting at a 3.8 and taking classes, you probably can go ahead and submit.

It's not going to make that much of a difference waiting on those courses.

And it may be in your best interest to get your application in early, especially if maybe you don't have the healthcare experience that the person who has a 3.0 has.

So it's all checks and balances, a balanced system of trying to figure out the best plan of attack to getting your application in, but making sure it's as complete as possible to give you the best, best chance possible.

So anyway, please just take a deep breath, don't stress, you're doing great.

Once you get into caspa, there's going to be different sections.

If you've made an account before, you get the option to either start over and wipe all of your information or pull your data over.

And that can take up to a day or so.

But if you pull your data over, this is something a lot of people are asking about and apply.

If you never submitted your application to a school, you are not seen as a re applicant.

The schools only view you as a re applicant if you actually turned your application into them, submitted it and paid the fee.

So don't worry about that.

That's more just CASPA categorizing you.

And again goes back to the fact that this is just a website, just software.

So the school and let's say you've applied last year to five schools and this year applying to 10 schools.

Those five schools you applied to will see you and know that you're a reapplicant.

The other five schools, the new ones, they will not know that you've applied to PA school.

PA schools do not know where else you've applied unless you tell them.

CASPA does not share that information.

That's not something they see.

So don't worry about that or like looking bad.

If it looks like you're a reapplicant, it doesn't look bad.

And as far as information that is saved in caspa, which one of my rules of thumb number one is do not rely completely on CASPA to save your information.

So if you're relying on that to keep track of your healthcare experience, patient care experience, please don't use an Excel spreadsheet.

Use something I have Excel sheet you can [email protected] downloads but do something because that could be a nightmare anyway.

The parts that come over, if you have submitted or entered things before is basically everything except for your letters of recommendation and your personal statement.

Letters of recommendation must be entered every single year.

So even let's say, and I've had a few people email me about this, let's say that this March, March 1st, you had somebody send in a letter.

It is not there.

It's not going to be there for this cycle.

You're going to have to have them send that letter again.

I know, it stinks.

The letters have to come directly from the letter writers.

You cannot save them, enter them yourself or use anything like Interfolio, which again, I know is frustrating, but you basically enter your letter writer's information.

They get an email where they can upload their letter and they do a little bit of ranking on different qualities.

But then that letter gets sent straight to Caspa.

So if you are thinking about that, make sure that you give your letter writers a heads up.

Kind of let them know what that timeline looks like and that they will be getting an email to do this personal statement is the other thing that does not transfer over to caspa.

Just to talk about your personal statement for a minute.

Little things.

It's 5,000 characters including spaces.

You basically copy paste it in there.

I would not write your essay in caspa.

I would write it in like a Word document.

And there's no special formatting, no bold, no underline, no italics, no tabs.

So to separate your paragraphs, this is a very personal pet peeve, is when I look and it's a huge just block of text.

It's so hard to read.

Enter does not count as a character.

So put two enters in between your paragraphs to separate them so that it's not just this huge block of letters and words because that's overwhelming.

But just little, little things there.

CASPA will ask you some personal information and sometimes people ask.

This was a question yesterday too is why is it asking about my family and parent information?

It's demographics.

It's just them trying to get a feel for the type of applicants they're getting and use that to research to do data, use that data as research to kind of gauge things later on.

It.

It doesn't matter.

I mean it doesn't really have a.

Any input on your status or anything.

There's not really a reason to not enter that.

And it can look kind of sketchy if you don't like just because there's not a reason not to.

So just do it.

It's not a big deal.

One thing, if you haven't already made an account that you may want to consider is making a separate email specifically for Caspa stuff.

I like to use the Gmail app because you get email notifications right away.

Whatever information you enter as far as your email is what the programs will use to contact you.

So if you're like me and your inbox is full of Old Navy and GAP emails.

You, you may miss that if it comes through.

So it may be worth setting up a new email to specifically get CASPA stuff.

You'll be on pins and needles.

Waiting is the worst part, but it'll be nice to kind of have one place to look.

And sometimes you'll get a notification and it'll just be a program saying they got your application.

So don't get too excited yet.

But, yeah, hopefully you'll get some of those interview invites this year.

But then you enter your academic history, and there's some things I want to clarify here, really important things, actually.

So when you enter academic history, you have to send all transcripts from a college level that you've taken.

No high school transcripts.

You enter that information, but you don't send a transcript.

I don't even know if you can get high school transcripts.

But anyway, college transcripts.

And you need the original official transcript from every college or university or community college or whatever that you have received college credit at.

A question I got a lot of times yesterday was, okay, well, my university, I took two summer classes at community college.

They're on my university transcript as transfer credits.

Do I still need that original transcript?

Yes, you must have the transcript from every single school that you actually attended.

It does not count if it's a transfer credit.

Things get kind of lost in translation there.

They want the originals, so that's something that you'll have to do.

It is not uncommon, and it does not look bad if you have courses from multiple schools.

That was another question.

I got to be honest, when I'm reviewing things for mock interviews or whatever, for the most part, people do have multiple schools.

And it's very rare for me to see someone who's only attended one school.

So don't worry about that.

Please, please don't worry about that.

In your academic history, you can pay for transcript entry.

Most people do not.

And even if you ask some of the CASPA people or the PAEA people, they'll tell you it's not really necessary.

It's time consuming to enter everything.

But if you just sit down and do it, it's really not that big of a deal.

Yes, you must enter every single grade you've ever received.

And even if the courses are greater than 10 years old, you still have to send the transcripts.

You still have to enter that information.

But when it comes down to it, you enter everything in.

And then once.

This is very important, you may want to turn it up or whatever when you go to submit your CASPA application, they will only calculate your GPA once and that's it.

So to give an example, if you are finishing up spring classes and you do not get your transcript, your official transcript with your grades until May 15, do not submit your CASPA application until you have submitted sent that official transcript to CASPA with those official grades and they have received it.

And then you can submit if you want those grades to go into your gpa.

And then let's say you're taking summer classes.

If you go back and you take a couple classes in the summer and you've already submitted, they will not recalculate your gpa.

You can send those transcripts in, you can add them later.

There are some things you can add add to CASPA afterwards, but.

But they are only going to do that GPA calculation once.

That has messed up a lot of people who were depending on courses to bring their GPA up to a competitive minimum.

So please keep that in mind.

Another reason not to rush, because I don't want you to get messed up by that.

There's not really a way around it.

So keep that in mind.

And when it comes to things you can add to CASPA after submitting, you can send in new transcripts, you can add experiences, which we'll talk about in a minute.

But anything you add after the fact, the schools, yes, they get an update that you updated your application or an email that you updated, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they looked at it.

So one thing I recommend doing is kind of updating the programs periodically every month or two.

Send the admissions email.

Just a quick email.

Hey, this is so and so.

If you could please just update my file.

I have 100 more work hours as a CNA.

I have 20 more shadowing hours.

Thank you so much.

Just kind of giving them a quick update on the fact that you're still working towards whatever your goal is and that you're still available.

So.

So yeah, that's just something you can do after you've entered academic history.

It's your supporting information, which is all of your experience.

Your GRE goes actually under your academic history.

Let's talk about that for a second.

Really quick.

I kind of forget about the GRE because I just don't think it's that important.

But it is.

I mean, you gotta do it if the school requires it.

When it comes to gre, you can, ideally, you want to have it in there and submitted before you submit your CASPA application.

You want your application to be as complete as possible.

If you're waiting to take it, that's fine, you can go ahead and submit.

But for schools that require it, your application is going to be seen as incomplete until they get that GRE score.

And you don't want it to accidentally get thrown out them thinking that you aren't taking the GRE or that you didn't know that.

So.

So ideally it's as complete as possible, but if you run into issues with that, just make sure that you're able to update the programs that you are planning on taking it or when that will be.

Same thing goes with coursework.

You can put planned and in progress coursework.

If you put that you're planning on taking a course, actually take it because you don't want to get accepted on the premise of you having a course and then you changed your mind and they rescind that acceptance.

So make sure that you are anything you put on your application is planned.

You need to actually do it.

All right, once we get into the supporting information, that's where your experiences are.

Experiences are broken down into different sections.

There's patient care experience, hands on, working with patients, healthcare experience, working in a healthcare setting, but not directly impacting a patient's career, shadowing, non healthcare related work experience, volunteer and research.

So in these different sections you can choose whether that experience was volunteer paid or if you got academic credit.

So one of the questions I was getting was okay, I do volunteering in a hospital.

Do I put that under volunteer or healthcare experience?

If it's a healthcare related thing, even if it's volunteer, it goes under healthcare experience.

And then you choose volunteer as the, I guess, type of payment.

So it's not paid, it's not academic credit, it's just volunteer.

That would be like a hospital volunteering job.

If you are volunteering at a homeless shelter, that would just be under volunteer.

So it can get confusing.

But ultimately the schools are going to decide what goes where anyway, so you don't have to worry about it too much.

All right, let's get into talking a little bit about personal statements.

So that's the one thing that you enter and I talked about it a little bit.

But one thing to keep in mind with this, and I just want to mention this, is once you submit your application, you cannot edit your personal statement.

That is one thing that cannot be changed.

The prompt is typically something like why do you want to be a pa?

Explain your motivations for becoming a pa, that type of thing.

But yeah, so make sure that once you get those 5,000 characters in there, which is About a page single spaced, a little over a page single spaced, that you do not need to make any changes.

Again, double, triple check everything.

It's very important.

One thing also is when you submit, you want to keep in mind that they have to verify your application.

If you look on caspa's website, they state that verification can take four to six weeks.

So that would mean you need to apply four to six weeks before a deadline.

The average time that they've most recently reported that it took was around six days.

It will probably be verified much sooner than four to six weeks, but plan accordingly just in case.

Don't want to get.

There's so many things that can be shocking about CASPA and applying to PA school, and it's really, really frustrating sometimes.

And I understand that one question I got yesterday was, are the programs going to verify my hours?

Do I need to upload a document?

Yes, you do not need to upload a document.

Most of the time the programs are not going to verify your hours.

They might if there's a question or if that's just something they do for accepted students.

But as far as for applicants, when they're getting thousands of applications, they cannot.

Call everyone on your experience list, make sure you're not stretching hours, don't double dip.

But for the most part they are not going to verify.

But that is why you have to enter the contact information, so that if there was a question, they would be able to reach out and find out about that.

All right, I think that's about all I've got.

I don't know.

If anyone has more CASPA questions, please email me, DM me.

I'll be doing more answers on Instagram and just kind of trying to make sure that y' all understand what's going on as much as possible.

But yeah, I hope that was helpful and not completely all over the place.

But yeah, so I'm here.

If you have any questions, please let me know and then I'll see you guys next week.

Bye.