Did your experience as a PA help you (or hurt you) in getting into med school?
Pa To Md
- Thread starter IDFTIGER
- Start date
W
Wizard of Oz
Wizard reaches for popcorn...
Can't really see it hurting you unless you have a pompous attitude. They'll likely ask you why you didn't just go straight to med school, but such questionning might differ based on how old you look.
Advantages? Good contacts/LOR's/experiences. Less doubt that you don't know what you're getting into.
Will it trump a bad MCAT or undergrad grades? Likely not. In all of the PA/MD flamewars I've been in on, the majority opinion is that PA experience will not give you an advantage with USMLE I, the key residency placer and the rate-limiting pot of gold that the med school needs you to locate at the end of a two-year rainbow. Hopefully you find more gold rather than just enough to fill the pot to make the school look good, and they first look to prereq/science/MCAT performance to measure your ability to reach that gold. Unfortunately this hurdle is not based on clinical skills/experiences which is more the emphasis of PA programs.
Let's emphasize now that the OP is talking about getting in here, so I will encourage the usual suspects to stay focused on admissions.
There are a few PA-to-MD's you can PM from the last battle if they don't chime in here.
emedpa, this is your cue!
D
deleted6669
pm pacmatt or bandit. they are both pa's in medschool now. any prior experience can only help. good luck
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2006
- Messages
- 445
- Reaction score
- 4
How would it hurt? As long as you have a reason. And honestly they'll just look at ur GPA and MCAT more than experiences anyway. So if those 2 are in order, then ur set.
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2005
- Messages
- 1,382
- Reaction score
- 13
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2006
- Messages
- 347
- Reaction score
- 0
Definitely can't hurt. Even though PA training is more clinical based, you already have a feel for the knowledge in the basic sciences section and this is a HUGE advantage 1st and 2nd year. You can fill in a lot of the details you didn't learn on your first go around while the other suckers are struggling to figure out that the right side is on the left side in Netters.
W
Wizard of Oz
I just thought of a true geek analogy. Think about the first time you learned about activation energy and catalysts...
USMLE I is like the peak of the reaction coordinate for an early reaction in a metabolic pathway, and adcoms want to see evidence of an enzyme in your application to attack that reaction, something that's going to help you bring that hump down. If you can't get past the hump, you're still stuck at reactants and can't make a product (an MD). The pathway gets blocked.
PA school, clinical skills, contacts, hospital experience, etc. may push the pathway once that hump has been passed, but these things are enzymes that act later in the pathway and are downstream of the rate-limiting step. Med schools may like to see those enzymes, but they also think that those enzymes aren't as highly regulated and are tougher to compare between applicants. They also think that capable students can reach the same place at the end of M4 that a previous PA can regardless of the apparent differences in background. You're a neophyte until you've done a residency anyway!
So the sorts of enzymes they like to see to work on the rate-limiting step (USMLE I) are undergraduate prereq's, MCAT, and undergrad science classes that they can use to compare you to other applicants (who are mostly still undergrads).
Of course to take it a step further, med schools don't like it when students invite inhibitors to the table (e.g. working during school).
The substrates are going to all be there for students at every accredited medical school. It's just up to the student to make the reaction work!
USMLE I is like the peak of the reaction coordinate for an early reaction in a metabolic pathway, and adcoms want to see evidence of an enzyme in your application to attack that reaction, something that's going to help you bring that hump down. If you can't get past the hump, you're still stuck at reactants and can't make a product (an MD). The pathway gets blocked.
PA school, clinical skills, contacts, hospital experience, etc. may push the pathway once that hump has been passed, but these things are enzymes that act later in the pathway and are downstream of the rate-limiting step. Med schools may like to see those enzymes, but they also think that those enzymes aren't as highly regulated and are tougher to compare between applicants. They also think that capable students can reach the same place at the end of M4 that a previous PA can regardless of the apparent differences in background. You're a neophyte until you've done a residency anyway!
So the sorts of enzymes they like to see to work on the rate-limiting step (USMLE I) are undergraduate prereq's, MCAT, and undergrad science classes that they can use to compare you to other applicants (who are mostly still undergrads).
Of course to take it a step further, med schools don't like it when students invite inhibitors to the table (e.g. working during school).
The substrates are going to all be there for students at every accredited medical school. It's just up to the student to make the reaction work!
Similar threads
