You got in. Now what actually happens?

This is the episode I'd hand to anyone holding an acceptance letter. First come the logistics - deposit, background check, immunizations, all the paperwork that shows up fast.

Then didactic year. For most programs that's Monday through Friday, roughly 8 to 5, in class or lab. Anatomy, pharmacology, clinical medicine, physical exam skills. It's a full-time job with homework, and the volume is the part that gets people. It's not harder material than undergrad - there's just so much more of it, coming so much faster.

Then clinical year, when you rotate through specialties and finally start feeling like you might actually be able to do this.

What I cover:

• What happens between acceptance and orientation
• Deposits, background checks, and pre-enrollment tasks
• What a didactic week really looks like
• The core courses and lab time
• Moving from didactic to clinical rotations
• How to prepare before you start

Resources:

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

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

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

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

Mentioned in this episode:

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In today's episode, we're talking about what PA school looks like.

Very practically, I'm going to go through the semesters, didactic, clinical and what a day in school looks like, depending on the semester.

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, thank you so much for joining me for the Pre PA Club podcast today.

I'm Savannah Perry, if we've never met before and I am a dermatology pa.

I am a mom to a one year old, I am a wife to a hospitalist.

A lot of medicine in my family and I like to think of the Pre PA club as our own little family as well.

If you are new to the podcast, welcome.

Make sure you check out all the links in the description.

There's a bunch of great stuff stuff there for you.

I'll kind of do a rundown.

I haven't done that recently.

So we have the Facebook group, the Pre Pa Club Facebook group, which is about 7,000 members of Pre Pa students, which is so cool.

That should not freak you out.

That is not competition.

This is camaraderie.

And there are great questions in that group.

I try to pop in, people tag me in questions if something comes up.

But if you have not joined that group, we would love to have you there.

There's also a link to some free downloads we have on the PA platform.

So thepaplatform.com downloads will have your resume template, your application timeline, personal statement, worksheets, interview prep worksheets, a healthcare experience, patient care experience, shadowing log, pretty much everything you need to be prepared for this process.

You can definitely check that out as well.

There's a link to my PA resource and PA School Prep with the discount codes.

So my PA resource is a service for personal statements.

So if that's something that you need assistance with, it's edited completely by pas.

The editing's done only by practicing pas who kind of know what we're looking for.

And I am one of the editors.

And then PA School Prep is for people who are about to start PA school and jump into the things that I'm gonna be talking about today and need a little assistance with making sure that you're solid in your anatomy and physiology and med terms knowledge.

And then the PA platform, we have things like mock interviews, prep assessments, GPA estimations, again, all done by practicing PAs.

But you can use the code future PA for any of those services.

And if you have any questions, always feel free to reach out on email, on Instagram, it's pretty easy HEPA platform.

And then we also have a link in the description where you can get a free audiobook.

And there's some really great medical books and study books on Audible.

If you're listening to this podcast, I'm going to assume that you like listening to things, and that may be a good option for you.

I'm trying so hard to get the PA School Interview Guide in audiobook form, but I have had a scratchy throat, which I don't know if you can tell now, for the past two weeks.

And so I've been recording it and working really hard on it, and then I've had to take a little break.

So once I feel like I sound relatively normal and I can talk for more than 10 minutes without having a coughing fit, I will try to jump back into that.

But today I've been getting some messages about just what PA schools like, what to expect.

And this isn't a question that can come up in interviews.

So schools may ask you, what do you think a day as a PA student looks like?

How do you plan on.

What do you plan on doing as a PA student?

That type of thing.

So I wanted to kind of break down exactly what.

And every program is going to be different, but what my program was like and there's a lot of similarities between programs, but what my program was like and kind of how I functioned and how I studied, that's another question I get, is like, how are you finding time to study?

Or how did you find time to study while you're in PA school?

So I've done a video and a podcast in the past, like, what.

What is PA school like?

And I talked more kind of generally.

So this is actually a little bit more step by step of what.

What happens in PA school.

And so let's start from, let's say when you get an acceptance.

So if you get an acceptance, you're going to be expected to put down a deposit.

That number can range from, you know, $100 to hundreds to thousands of dollars.

And that kind of holds your spot in the program.

And, you know, depending on your application cycle, you can be accepted to a program anywhere from a year ahead of time to a few weeks ahead of time.

If you listen to my conversation with Taylor, where she got accepted, I mean, she really only had two months or so before school started, and she starts school on Monday, which is crazy.

And it was funny because she went to orientation and came back.

Or she was texting me and saying, if I hear how hard PA schools and me one more time, that's all anyone keeps saying.

And I just told her, I said, you wait two weeks and you're going to be saying the exact same thing.

You are in for it.

And then Erica, who's been on the podcast before too, was messaging me saying, this is the hardest thing I've ever done.

And it is.

And George has said the same thing.

So it's hard for me to tell you just how intense PA school is.

And part of that is because it's a lot of material, some of it's difficult, but it's just getting thrown at you very, very quickly and it can be difficult to stay on top of it.

Alright, so you get accepted PA school, you put in your deposit.

So some schools will have you do some work prior.

So some of that may just be a checklist, you know, getting a background check, drug screen, getting your supplies, that type of thing.

But sometimes you do have to complete a course.

So for my program, before we went in, we knew that at the first week we were going to have a medical terminology test.

And if you took the test and passed, you could keep whatever score you got on the test as your final score in the class and not have to complete it.

Or, or you could complete the course if you either didn't pass the test or wanted to get a better grade.

Do grades matter in PA school for getting a job?

No.

No one ever asked me about my grades.

No one ever asked me about that.

They wanted to know that I had gone to school, that I had completed boards, and that I was a certified pa.

So PA school is broken down into two separate parts.

So didactic year, and that means the time that you're in the classroom and then your clinical year, which is the time that you're on rotations.

So they may have you do some of those assignments and things ahead of time.

You're probably going to have an orientation you have to go to.

Once didactic phase starts, you can expect to have a commitment to the school of being available for class Monday through Friday from 8 to 5, maybe even more, maybe even in the evenings, maybe even on the weekends.

That doesn't necessarily mean that you will always be in class that long though, but that's to kind of get your mindset in the right place.

That's what you need to be thinking about and kind of expecting.

So my didactic phase, my program at all was 27 months.

And so that was essentially seven semesters we started in the summer in May.

And so we had a year and an extra summer of didactic, so four semesters of didactic training and then a year or three semesters of clinicals.

So in that first summer semester and I actually have this up in front of me and things may have changed some, but that first summer semester is when we jumped into anatomy and physiology.

That was our main class during that time.

We also had pharmacology, medical terminology and genetics and that medical terminology, like I said, we got to take a test.

I think I got a B on the test.

I was fine with that.

I took that as my grade and did not have to worry about any of that.

Everything else for the other people was self guided.

So they would work on their med terms for the people who had to finish that throughout the course, throughout the semester.

So things like genetics and pharmacology and physiology for those courses we met one day a week for a variety, maybe an hour, two hours to have a lecture.

And then we had periodic tests throughout the semester as well.

Physiology for me also had a self guided proponent.

So there were lectures that you could go to or you could learn it yourself.

And then you kind of planned, I mean was a time period where you had to go in and take the test, but you just kind of did it on your own time.

And I think you could take the test twice.

So if you didn't do well, you could study and figure out what you needed to work on and learn and then go back and take it again.

And there was some physiology mixed in with our anatomy, but they were separate classes.

So for anatomy we were with the occupational therapy and the physical therapy students.

It was a big group.

We were taught by the exact same professors that taught the med students.

And we used the same lab.

And the lab was really, I thought it was great when I was there, but since then they've redone it at my school and it's, I mean, state of the art, like really cool now.

So we had a full cadaver dissection.

The way that worked is we went in on Monday through Thursday from 8 to 12 and we would have lecture from, you know, 8, I think.

Lecture, yeah, lecture was from 8 to 10.

And then if you got, if you had dissection, you went in from 10 to 12.

So we would dissect on two days of the week.

Each cadaver had two separate groups of four students.

So I was with three other students.

And we would dissect on either Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday.

So you would go in from 10 to 12.

So some days you're there from 8 to 10, some days you're there from 8to12.

And then on Fridays is when we would have some of those other lectures or in the afternoons, just depending on what was going on.

You have to kind of just be available and flexible in your schedule.

And then Fridays were for our anatomy test, which there would be a written portion and then there would also be a practical where we went in and had to identify structures on the cadavers or.

And you know, it's hard to describe, but graduate level anatomy is so different than undergrad anatomy.

Like if you were in undergrad and you're like, oh my gosh, there are so many structures.

Okay, well just imagine that those structures have structures and those have functions and purpose.

And it, I mean, so many things that you have to know and learn.

And cadaver labs are cool.

I don't know that you necessarily 100% have to have a cadaver lab, but it was a really neat experience.

So that was the first semester.

Anatomy was tough.

We only had three tests.

The first one I got a C. The second one I got a B.

The last one I finally got an A.

But it was definitely a learning curve.

Trying to figure out the best way to study, the best way to test myself, make sure I knew, knew what I needed to for the test going into that.

So then in fall we jump into what we call clinical medicine or Clinmed.

And this is when you start getting into kind of the nitty gritty of actually learning medicine, honestly.

We also had classes like medical communication, which would be like one hour a week.

And then we had physical exam, which is where you actually learn, you know, how to do an exam on a patient and take a history and do all the, the things you need to, to actually take care of patients.

We also had biostats and epidemiology and that was one class.

And then pharmacology and so the way that it would work.

So what they do now, and I'm looking at it and I think ours was similar.

This for fall is showing orthopedics, dermatology, ophthalmology, infectious disease and ENT and ekg.

So these classes, they're split into different credits.

So things like dermatology, ophthalmology, infectious disease, all of those are two credits.

So those were two two week courses.

Orthopedics is three credits.

So it was a three week course.

So we would learn everything about a body system all at the same time.

So for dermatology we would still have pharmacology going on, we would still have physical exam and they would try to kind of line up so that we're learning all of that together at the same time.

And so for those these semesters moving forward, we were there Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 8 to 5, I mean, lecture all day long the entire time.

And then on Tuesdays and Thursdays, that's when we had a little more flexibility.

We would have biostats on one of those days in the morning or afternoon.

And then we had physical exam, which is when we were actually learning everything.

And we would be split up into small groups, so it was a group of four of us and we would all kind of practice on each other what we were learning.

So that was fall semester.

And then it followed this schedule pretty much for the rest of didactic year.

So then spring semester we had surgery, which was a weekly course where we learned surgical techniques, had a lot of kind of practical stuff, more pharmacology.

And then we had cardiology, pulmonology, nephrology and urology, gastroenterology and hemonc.

And, and so those were kind of some of the heavy hitter subjects that were maybe a little bit more difficult even.

So like cardiology was five weeks, pulmonology was four weeks.

Those longer sections, we would have two tests instead of one and they were a little bit more involved.

And then coming into the summer semester, we still had some of those Clin med classes like emergency medicine, pediatrics, obgyn, endocrinology, neurology, psych.

But then we also added in things like ethics, medical writing to learn for doing our master's project.

And then we still had pharmacology there as well.

And my school is really great about trying to make sure we had a lot of hands on experience.

So we also would have clinical time during didactic year where once a week we would go in or I don't know if it was weekly, but we would have times where we went into clinic with our teachers to help kind of make sure that we were able to practice what we were learning and actually interacting with patients.

And that was really great.

And then we had a full surgical suite.

So we got to learn there.

We learned venipuncture, drawing blood on each other, starting IVs, giving injections, sub Q, intermuscular, intramuscular, and then do I do another kind of.

I remember.

But yeah, so we learned a lot on each other.

And then we also, I mean, went to simulation labs.

We were very involved throughout the entire schooling process.

And as hands on as we could be.

So after that is when we get into our clinical phase and we had 12 separate four week rotations.

And just note that you are never allowed or required to set up your own rotation sites.

That is against accreditation standards.

So you will never be asked to do that.

That's not to say that you can't sometimes if there's something particular you want to do, but you will never be required to do it.

And so the way they put us into rotation sites was there was a lottery.

So there's a lottery for figuring out your schedule because for some people, they wanted their electives at the end, some people wanted them at the beginning.

We had a teaching elective where we came in and served as TAs and worked on our master's paper that we were going to submit to journal.

And some people wanted that during a certain month because it was a little bit more flexible.

So you kind of ranked the different schedules how you wanted them to be and then you could, you could request rotation sites if it was open during your month.

So the rotations we did were adult medicine, which is like internal medicine.

And they preferred that we did four weeks in a hospital setting and four weeks in an outpatient setting.

I did mine in endocrinology and an outpatient internal medicine.

And going into it, I thought I was going to hate endocrinology, which is actually why I chose to do a rotation in it.

But it turned out that I loved it and I got offered a job.

But I already had a job surgery.

Mine was with a general surgeon who primarily did breast cancer surgery.

And I loved it.

I tried to get him to hire me, but he loved his patients too much to have a PA because he wants to see everybody.

But it was an amazing rotation and he actually got me my job in dermatology.

Family medicine.

I was with super sweet older physician who's now retired.

But I learned a lot.

I was in kind of a smaller area.

It was a small practice.

Got to see some cool stuff on that rotation.

Emergency medicine.

I also loved that rotation.

I got to suture some chainsaw wounds because we'd had a big eye ice storm.

They made me try to set a child's broken arm and I about passed out.

But I, I really liked emergency medicine.

If it wasn't for the broken bones, I might could see myself doing that.

Pediatrics, which is where I learned that I would prefer not working with patients who are sick enough to cough in my face.

And I got so sick at the end of it, I finally went in my last week.

And they were like, yeah, you have pneumonia.

You are so sick.

I had to take all this medicine and get an inhaler and stuff.

So.

Kids are tough, honestly.

I mean, they, they don't know that you're trying to help them.

So I see plenty of peds in derm.

I think I'm good.

Psych, psychology, psychiatry.

I did not enjoy my psych rotation.

I was in an inpatient psych unit, closed unit for four weeks.

I saw some really tough stuff.

It kind of messed with me mentally.

I had other classmates who had great experiences, particularly in addiction medicine.

So I think this is an example of how your experience plays a huge role in just your impression of a certain area.

But yeah, that where I was at particularly was not for me, obgyn.

I loved my ob GYN rotation.

I don't know that it's something I would want to do full time, but I really did enjoy it.

We had 14 births while I was there, so I got to see tons of births.

Every single type C sections.

It was very, very interesting.

So I liked that.

And then we had our master's project in teaching TA rotation, which I talked about, and then two electives that we could choose.

I ended up doing those at my job.

I was starting after school, which was great because it was free training for them where they weren't having to pay me.

And I was able to kind of jump in, so that was good.

Looking back, I kind of wish I did a cardiology rotation just because that's such a huge part of boards.

And I think doing those rotations and having that hands on experience helps to solidify a lot of that information that you don't ever really get that chance to.

To do again.

Like, I guess I could go shadowing cardiology, but I would never get that chance to go immerse myself in it for a month.

But that was kind of my PA school experience.

And then you graduate, you take boards.

You can take boards as soon as two weeks after your finish date.

And then you've got to wait a little bit and then you get licensed and you're a pa.

So if anyone has more questions specifically about what PA schools like, I'm happy to answer them based on my experience.

And then I'm sure there are others who are happy to share what their experience was like if it was a little bit different.

But thank you so so much for tuning in.

And I will talk to you guys next week by.