What would my chances be of getting into a PA school?

[bme94]

Hi,

I was on the pre-med track all throughout college with the idea of becoming a physician, but after careful consideration, I'm thinking that PA might be a better fit for me. What would my chances be? If anyone could weigh in, that'd be great. Also, I understand that applying early for medical school is crucial. I've been researching PA programs, but I still am unsure of whether the timing is as big of an issue with PA schools.

Undergraduate GPA: 3.71
Science GPA: 3.61
Experiences:
>200 scribing in an emergency room, scribed with PAs, MDs, and DOs
500 hours of clinical research at a children's hospital
400 hours of non-clincal research
100 hours of service in my community
I also have additional shadowing.

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[pamac]

Its best to apply as early as you can. One of the points of logic on that regard is that as admissions committees fill seats, they get more choosy who they bestow the blessing of a seat upon.... things that are rare become more valuable. You want your application to be one of the first ones they see before they look at all the folks that have interesting backgrounds and better grades.

Your experience is probably adequate for a significant portion of the schools. Your GPA's are decent. Higher is always better, but obviously we go to war with the army we have, not the one we dream of but don't have. To be clear, your GPA is decent to good. I feel like if someone has above 3.5 on both, they are in positive territory. That puts it where it needs to be for them to look at the rest of your application. If they like what they see on the rest of it, they will let you in.

Now you do research and find the programs that don't care much about good health care experience, and apply to them. There are plenty. I'd get some more service hours in there... they love that. Put together an awesome personal statement... obsess over it. Apply to a broad swath of programs. You should get some interviews if you have a good personal statement and don't apply to places that have high thresholds for good health care experience. You probably should shadow more, and shadow PA's. Programs want to think that you think you know what you are getting into. Don't be tempted to chase after a bunch of HCE by becoming a paramedic or medical assistant. Its a waste of time for how much it will help you. The application cycle opens up in like April or something, so keep racking up service and possibly scribing more. If you can get your CNA and do that for a while, why not... but not at the expense of doing something more productive like retaking a class you did poorly in, or hammering out another prereq, etc. The exception to that might be if you want to apply to a program near to you that says they want like 500 hours HCE and says it has to be CNA or better.

 

[lee9786]

Pamac could you elaborate on why you don't recommend bme94 to get more HCE? Would it be to the time and money costs?

 

[pamac]

I just think that with the decent gpa, and the background that they already have, there are already schools that would take a good look at them. It would take several months minimum to get into a position to get any amount of decent health care experience, and that still wouldn't be enough to open doors to a vastly larger number of programs. To me it seems like going through a commercial drivers license school to get trained to get a license to drive a regular passenger car. The schools that want to see health care experience want to see a lot of it. There are indeed some that don't have really high requirements, and just want to see at least little bit of health care experience, but you have to ask yourself if it's worth the time it would take to go to the effort. I don't think it's a critical thing to do when there are plenty of programs that place more weight on things like GPA and extracurriculars. Health care experience can give you great perspective and something to talk about in your application essay and in interviews, but I have my doubts about how much perspective a brief amount of it would contribute. It's all about where you want to focus your resources. To me, time is the most valuable resource. PA school is tremendously expensive, so monetary cost of obtaining HCE seems negligible to me as opposed to the drain on time. Far higher impact comes from maintaining good grades and high gpa. I'd much rather be an applicant with a 3.75 science and cumulative gpa and no HCE than an EMT of 6 months with a 3.3 gpa science and cumulative gpa. If the kid with good grades absolutely needed to get HCE, it would take just a few months to rack up enough to qualify for most "HCE schools"(i.e. the ones that require like 600 hours). By comparison, the EMT would need to spend tons of time and money to get their GPA up to 3.75 (if it would even be possible). The time is passed that HCE will dig someone out of getting bad grades.

If you aren't in a position to apply to medial school if you wanted to, then you really should think twice about applying to PA school. Certainly, anyone can throw their hat in the ring and spend a lot of money wasting their time, but most schools seem to have an average gpa of successful applicants of 3.6 or better. I wouldn't expect they leave a lot of seats for many folks with less than that. At the end of the day, PA programs are cramming a lot of academic concepts down their students throats, so being able to keep up is critical. Taking blood pressure with an automated cuff and getting patients up to the bathroom... not so much.