Look at the overall picture. The average gpa of a successful pa school applicant is quite high, and I think it’s safe to say they are around 3.6 these days as a generalization. For folks to get that average gpa, they have to have had quite a few courses where they are getting A’s. Most of their grades for the courses they take end up being A’s, A-‘s, B+’s.... and occasional B’s or B-‘s. Very rare will you see a C in there... and I’d say that most folks accepted don’t have C’s. PA school is very demanding as far as time and discipline, and those folks spend a ton of time in class only to go home and study more. They aren’t picking students with good grades as a reward to them for meeting an arbitrary threshold, they are choosing folks who they feel will succeed in a tough academic environment. When we talk of upward trends, we should ask ourselves what an upward trend demonstrates..... it demonstrates someone that didn’t figure things out for a while, and there’s still no way of knowing if they did figure it out like the folks who stayed steady and demonstrated quality throughout their academic career, the latter being a better bet for staying the course in PA school. Also keep in mind that a lot of what they cover in PA school is built upon a common foundation that those courses developed. If you haven’t mastered those concepts, you will be that much farther behind your peers that did master them. There is no reason someone should not have A’s or A-‘s in anat and phys 1 and 2, microbiology, sociology, and general psychology. You can live with B+’s or B’s in Organic, and general chem, and genetics. Biochemistry can be a C. That’s really all the leeway one can expect. Your typical successful PA applicant will be ok with that kind of profile, along with a great essay and decent extracurriculars and volunteer experience, as long as they apply to around 10 programs just to be safe. And even then, they really aren’t “safe”.
There are several ways I visualize the struggle to get into PA school, and these are a few: If you were a student with an average gpa of 3.2-3.3 applying at a program with 10 students trying for each seat, that puts you around the middle of the pack. So roughly 5 students below you, and 5 students above. In a hypothetical seat, the top person of the ten applicants gets the seat, essentially leaving four people ahead of you that also didn’t get picked. For the next seat, you don’t have to beat out the 5 students ahead of you again.... you are now facing the 5 students, PLUS the four ahead of you that didn’t make the cut for the last seat. Then after that, you have 5 new competitors, plus the 4, and then the other 4. It just keeps getting worse as you go. Think about how if 500 people are applying for 50 seats, 450 people go home without a seat at that school. If you are middle of the pack in that group, that still puts you roughly 175 back from the last person they picked. That’s IF you are in the middle of the pack, which is doubtful with a 2.6 gpa in either overall gpa or science gpa. A decent portion of folks that apply to PA school really don’t have any business applying due to their mediocre grades, but it is enough of a pain to apply to PA school that it cuts down on the posers (and I would guess that at least 70 percent of folks that apply are pretty serious candidates with gGPAs above 3.3). If someone isn’t in the top 10 percent of applicants, they really would have to win the lottery to gain a seat. Now, when the entire applicant pool nationwide is considered, and applicants are spread around to the multiple schools that they typically apply to, around half of the whole applicant pool ends up getting accepted, but that math is complicated by the fact that you aren’t going to apply to all programs out there in America.
So those are a bunch of mental exercises to help illustrate the dilemma of trying to get in to one of the more popular careers around, especially one where almost anyone can apply with a few extra prerequisites that folks can take as electives. Programs are really focused on recruiting folks that can handle the academic rigor of a fast paced program. Anyone that washes out before he end represents a lot of money that a program loses. If you flunk out in the first six months, they are out around $75,000 because of that empty seat (which is a ton of money when you consider that they nickle and dime every applicant at least $100 bucks just to apply, which for a typical program can bring in around $80,000 alone.... they want every penny). That’s almost an entire faculty members salary for a year. They can’t have folks flunk often at all. It’s nothing personal, it’s just math.
The best indicator of a students success isn’t upward trend, it’s past academic excellence. They get no brownie points for granting seats to folks that struggled in their previous academic careers, and in fact are essentially penalized for it several times over if that student fails.
So, long story short, you should seriously consider an alternate route, and think of PA school as a shot in the dark. I suggest that because college is expensive, and time wasted is expensive as well. But finish out strong with your degree and look at the possibility of going to an accelerated RN program, or look at podiatry school. I actually think podiatry is the most obtainable plan in your circumstances, and actually would give you a higher income potential than just about anything else available to you, even If you somehow became a PA. Podiatry is longer, and would be considerably more expensive, though. Pod schools take almost anyone. But by contrast, it’s still quite challenging to complete.
