PA admissions

[badasshairday]

Hi,

My girlfriend recently decided to pursue PA school. She is a little late in the process and is working on racking up her clinical experience hours.

I have a few questions about PA admissions process.

1) I understand that admissions are rolling like for med school, so is it going to severely put her at a disadvantage if she applies in september? Is PA school ferociously competitive like med school?

2) She was looking up some of the admissions requirements and different schools have say different things. She said she saw one or two schools that said there was a minimum of 500 recorded hours of cliinical work required to apply. Other schools did not mention anything like this. Is this true across the board? Maybe not 500hours, but say other schools might have a 300 hour minimum?

Thank you.

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[deleted6669]

1. YES, applying late puts her at a disadvantage. pa school is VERY competitive. the local program here has around 1000 applications for 100 interviews for 35 spots.
2. 125 of 140 programs require prior medical experience. for most of these the low end cutoff is around 1000 hrs. a typical pa school applicant has traditionally been a former paramedic, rn, or resp. therapist.the more experience an applcant has the better their chances for getting in and staying in pa school. typically those with minimal experience struggle through and/or don't pass. pa school is designed to build on prior medical experience, not build a competent provider from scratch.
if she really only has a few hundred hrs of experience she is probably a better fit for medschool as they are more interested in grades than expreience, the opposite of the pa model which stresses prior high level medical experience as the best predictor of success.
From the aapa website( american academy of pa's): ( www.aapa.org)
"The majority of entering students have a BA/BS degree and just under 40 months of health care experience before admission to a PA program. "

40 months of experience is over 6500 hrs......
the avg in my class was over 5 yrs/10,000 hrs. as an emt/er tech/paramedic for 10yrs I was one of the youngest and least experienced in my entering class( although I ended up graduating 3/80).most of my class was in their 30's and 40's and had worked in health care for > 15 yrs. I was 27.

 

[Febrifuge]

My program did rolling interviews; they got about 1000 applications, interviewed about 450 people, and accepted around 50. The cool thing about rolling admissions is that there was one interview day a month for a string of six or eight months; some got letters of acceptance in the week after the interview, and some got letters at the end, after the whole cycle was complete. So, like most things, the rolling nature of the admissions can work in an applicant's favor, or not.

More clinical hours is always better. And I'm not just talking in terms of getting an interview or getting accepted, I mean it will help you in classes. I know she's concerned right now with getting from point A to point B, but the thing about PA school is, point C is right there as well, and it's smart to prepare for that right now, as well.

It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine, when people are so goal-directed as to lose track of the overall point, which is to become competent to take care of patients. I'm not saying you or your girlfriend have this outlook, but many PA school applicants do. And now that I've been in school for more than a month, I can say that the instructors can't stand this mentality either. There's just so little time in PA school to get grounded in the basic stuff.

 

[Tranquility]

Aww...i knew clinical hours were important..but i didnt know they were THAT important...
i already have my med tech degree and decided to go back with that...i thought it would be a great head start...Well, considering i still want to get my Masters in Public health as well...i guess I can just work on that while achieving clinical hours.....

whats the best option for obtaining these hours? My hospital offers a volunteer program called Physician shadowing that im definately going to do...and....i can work as a CCT per diem as well therre...and do some phlebotomy...

I am one of those people that want to get from A to B simplly because I feel as though im wasting soooo much time weeding through all these prereqs and things i dont want to take...i just want to go back to studying the medicine portion of things...I LOVED med tech school and graduated with honors...now..im trying to get by on the regular stuff...and its soo boring to me....AND..i dont want to be in school till im 35! grr!

 

[Febrifuge]

Well, I just turned 37, in the second week of school. So I hope it's not the end of the world to be in school past 30.

The med tech thing is great; if you've had hands-on experience with patients, and if you've worked in a clinic or a hospital, then you know a lot of the stuff that your stereotypical, head-in-a-book med student wouldn't know. How things work. What people's different jobs are. How to interact with real people.

Add to that some hours shadowing, so that you can honestly and confidently say that you want to be a PA (rather than an RN, or an MD, or a paramedic), and you should be set.