its up to you to get a complete rundown on the prereqs from the individual programs... they vary quite a bit, especially among PA schools. you have some schools that have an ideal applicant with a lot of HCE, and some want very high GPAs, and care less about HCE. in general, the prereqs arent the complicated part of becoming an ideal candidate for a school, its the overall profile that makes it hard to take a shotgun approach to applying to PA programs as a backup. if you have a premed courseload, you are likely to be fairly close as far as the academic prereqs go, but you will be sniffed out by those looking over the applications if they see on your application, for example, a ton of hours in clinical research with no contact with patients. then you get your essay looked at, and your letters of rec. Ive heard that PA adcoms are sensetive to the notion that they admit people that can't hack getting into medical school. there are enough excellent PA candidates aleady that they dont have to entertain folks who really want to be doctors... so they don't do it.
Nursing school prereqs also vary, but the problem you will have there is A) lots of folks that want to be nurses get good grades in nursing prereqs (the nurses i know personally had great gpa's... because pre nursing sciences are easy). B) you might actually not have classes that they will accept as prereqs because of the fact that they arent the exact nursing prereqs. when i applied to nursing school, i was lucky that they allowed my ochem to be considered instead of chem 101 which i didnt have. not every program will allow this. and like PA programs, RN programs vary widely as far as thier criteria and prereqs. you could probably get in nursing with no problem, but the difference between a doctor and a nurse is vast. you have to be ready to face the possibility that you could have been a doctor, and instead are cleaning up someones stool when there isnt a nurse aid around.
if you have the time to come up with 3 references that can articulate why you will be a great PA, and 3 that can do that for nursing, as well as compile differeing prereqs that fit into the critera for the various nursing and PA schools out there, then you may want to go for it. that sounds really complicated to me, but only you know what you are hoping to accomplish. i was pre-PA, and just got into nursing school, but that was less of a backup plan for me than it was a decision on what was best for where i am now. i like to think that i would have gotten into PA school this year if i had applied. i know the feeling of wanting a fallback. Ive decided that for me, its just better to put all my chips in on my goal and not quit until i make it happen. otherwise, we often take the path of least resistance when the going gets tough.
