Archive for the ‘CASPA Application Aid’ Category

Art of interviewing…..(Part 1)

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

The time of year has arrived to start the process of Interviewing for PA Programs. I have not finished the Post on Interviewing but I will post what I have  so far.

I was reminded that I had started to put together this post a while ago but it remains incomplete. This fall a couple of my fellow students and I will be meeting Fridays before weekend PA Program Interviews. We have small, informal Q&A sessions for all of the prospective students that are in town the night before interviews. During these meetings it is an open floor for (with no faculty present) questions about how our PA program works. Most questions are directed toward the nature of the interview and what interviewing at our program was like. Stories are told of other interviews and the jobs that we had that got us a letter of acceptance. With these “meet and greets” come the joy of being questioned and the feeling of helping out as the classes before did for us. These are Faculty Free meetings of which nothing is passed along and the questions you ask bear no weight on any decision. We are just students trying to help and give any guidance we can which will hopefully help you in your interviews to follow!

With that….here are some tips for interviewing:

I don’t think there is nor should there be any ART involved in interviewing. There need be only common sense, some quick wit and a boat load of respect. NO ART. There are two very different places to sit during an interview. You can be the one conducting the interview or the person being interviewed.  The advantage is held by person that exudes the most confidence, and eludes to having what the other wants.

(Interviewing for Physician Assistant Programs is going to the focus of this piece of writing) I will revisit the role of  the Faculty member/School Representative, but for now lets enjoy the other side of the table, or the “hot seat”.

For starters you have to be invited to interview. Physician Assistant Programs do not interview potential students that “just drop by” or “happen to be in town visiting an Aunt”. To be granted an interview at a PA Program you first have to submit your application (See Post on CASPA Application Aid). Upon review of the application and acknowledgment of  acceptable levels of achademic and professional achievement the student is sent and email or letter informing them that they have been offered an interview.  There are a couple different routes that schools can take when conducting interviews. There are some schools (though few) that will send out a letter and the prospective student can choose from a short list of dates to interview. Most schools will send out a letter and in the body of the letter will include your interview date of which unless there are phenomenally important extenuating circumstances (i.e. death or dying) you will be unable to reschedule.

The invitation to interview should be met with joy. You will not get in to a program without interviewing so the offer to sit and discuss your potential candidacy with a program is a direct  yourself as a desirable student. Not only should you be excited about the offer to interview but the offer itself is reaffirming of the fact that your application was done well and complete. In the piece that I wrote about the CASPA application I stress the importance of needing to make sure that the application is done correctly the first time.

Most interview award letters will arrive a couple weeks before the interview. The timeline is often difficult for those that will require plan fare to make it to the interview. Advanced notice is always appreciated, however I did interview will a couple students that were  informed only 36 hours prior to the interview. When interview letters are sent they are sent with the idea that the school has decided on a magic number of students that it feel comfortable interviewing on a given weekend. It is the schools hope that all those offered interviews will accept the interview. It is often the case that students will have accepted at  a school already or are not able to make it to the interview date they were assigned. In these circumstances there are now more available spots to interview and more letters are sent out and if real short on time, emails and phone calls can be made.

The interview is often made in to a weekend, full day event or just a couple hours. No matter the festivities or tours or speakers present the INTERVIEW will only be an hour or so at the most. Schools will combine the interview with lunch or breakfast and sometimes rather lengthy informational sessions. When you arrive on campus you are so excited to be interviewing and you want to make a great impression, however you are going to be quite surprised by how much the school is trying to sell you their program……..

MORE TO COME…

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CASPA Application Breakdown (Part 2)

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

……the last time I sat down to write about the CASPA Application I had just finished typing up an overview and little bit if guidance about the NARRATIVE. Not wanting to play God, I left the writing of the narrative to you and your interpretation of ”Why you want to be a PA…..and/or What your motivation for wanting to become a PA was?”  I put forth what will hopefully be considered some helpful hints and some topics to stay away from.

It is Sunday and I have so much anatomy to be studying……I have eight, 2 hour physiology lectures to sort through, 4 histology/pathology lectures consisting of over 300 human tissue slides, pre-reading for the 3 hour blood chem. lecture for a 7am start on Monday, Genetics, reading for patient interviewing, and preparing a 1 hour presentation on Acid and Base Balance. I love the EXPERIENCE OF BEING A PA STUDENT!

Luckly for me I have this penchant for writing and a real love for the material that I am studying. So here goes the rest of the CASPA Application Breakdown….

Following the NARRATIVE portion of the application is…

PATIENT CONTACT EXPERIENCE:  This section and the following few, are quite easy to fill out. It might be humbling to actually have to type it all out, and hopefully you have more patient contact experience than you previously thought…… however is hardly that case. In this section you want to include anytime that you were with a patient. Handling the patient and having to physically provide care matters a lot in the medical world. There are hundreds if not thousands of auxillary and support positions in hospitals and none of those are going to get you in to school. The role of a Physician Assistant is to care for the patient. You have to be comfortable with people that are sick, dying, newly born, contageous, and carriers of disease. In this section of the application you want to include the job or jobs that you had when you were in CONTACT with the patient.  I for example was on a Bariatric Patient Lift Team, a phlebotomist (some schools do not accept this as patient contact……and I have no idea why), a Patient Sitter and worked with Physical Therapy for post-op patients. Other examples would be working as a CNA, Emergency Department Tech, Anesthesia Tech, Nurse, Physical Therapist…..etc.

Each position that you list you are given room to explain the nature of your job. This explaination should be in defence of why you have decided to list this job as patient care experience. If you have never held any of the previous postitions in or around a hospital you might still be alright. There are many jobs that can be considered patient care experience the key is extrapalating out the experiences that you did have and explaining the value of them with regards to patient contact.

HEALTH RELATED EXPERIENCE:  In this section like the last, you are able to list experiences that you have had in and around a hospital. The difference between this section and the last is that a lot of health related experience is built out of knowledge and observation…….not neccessarily patient contact. The examples of health related experiences would be the hours that you have put in shadowing a PA. Your shadowing (required by most programs) might have been in a hospital, underserved clinic, family practice, or out in the field. There are a lot of experiences that count toward this section…….observation of surgeries, health policy, dietary…..etc. This field should be easily filled in as this is usually the basis for your decision for why you wanted to become a PA. You have the whole field of medicine to go in to but through some medical experience, you chose to apply to PA schools? What experience was that? What was it that you saw being done? Did you witness the type of person that you wanted to be? Or were you moviated to help because you know that you can do what you saw being done that day?

In health related experience you have to list the dates or the time period (in hours) that you spent doing said activities. You are asked if you were paid (hopefully not during your shadowing), and you are also asked who your supervisor was that day. The most important part of this section is that you are allowed to list the same job/expereince in  HEALTH RELATED EXPERIENCE as you are in PATIENT CONTACT EXPERIENCE. The catch is that if a job that you had could count for both catagories…..you have to split your hours between the two sections.

ex. I worked in Patient Transport full time for 1 week = 40 hours. I can list it as PCE for 20 hours due to parts of the job where I was lifting and moving patients in and out of bed, transporting patients during codes and assisting in the emergency room during overflow. I am also allowed to put the remaining 20 hours in to the HRE section as my job was also made up of times of less patient contact i.e. discharging patients, aiding out-patients to appointments, and the other intangables of getting to see what goes on in all of the other departments in the hospital.  It is in your best interest to describe your experience in the provided area and spare no detail. There are reasons why you want to be a PA….something touched you or captivated your attention…..it was either an experience or the culmination of a lot things you have seen or done. Be thurough and explain it all with the same passion and excitement that you felt that day.

OTHER EMPLOYMENT:  In this section you have to list all of the jobs that you have had in the last 10 years……or maybe it is all of the jobs that you have EVER had. Either way that was a lot of jobs for me as I was out of school for a bit and couldn’t seem to find what it was that I wanted to be. You have to list dates when you were employed, if you are still employed with that company and roughly how many hours you worked weekly.

If you have not picked up on it already, here it is: THE MEDICAL FIELD WANTS TO KNOW IF YOU ARE ABLE TO WORK LONG HOURS AS MOST MEDICAL FACILITES ARE OPEN 24 HOURS A DAY. When applying to a PA program you are not applying to a 9-5 lifestyle. This is not to say that you can’t get right out of school and land a 9-5 in a primary care facility, if thats what you want. A lot of PA’s work in hospitals, pull “on call” hours and even work night shifts and weekends. Not only is it a toss up as to the hours that you are going to be putting in when you graduate but the hours that you are going to put in during your clinical rotations will be well over 70 hours a week. For your surgical residency you will work 4-5 days a week roughly at 12 hours a day with one day/night spent “on call” in the hospital for 24 hours. You have to be willing to put in the time.  Prior work experience displaying your ability to work long hours is going to help the admissions committees recognize this.

(I would like to say LIST ALL EMPLOYMENT! But I know that there are going to be jobs that you are not going to want to list. There are going to be jobs that you only managed to have for a couple weeks or decisions that you made that ended in your termination as an employee. I think the right thing to do is be honest. It is better to show that you were always working and able to find a job with ease, then to have an obvious gap on a timeline and nothing to say about it. Even the worst jobs/experiences have a “take home story”…….let it be known that you have changed or at least learned from a mistake and vow to never do it again)

COMMUNITY SERVICE:  This is the spot where you list community service. YOU ARE NOT TO HAVE BEEN PAID FOR ANYTHING THAT YOU LIST IN THIS SECTION……. YOU ARE NOT DOING ANY COMMUNITY ANY REAL SERVICE BY CHARGING THEM FOR YOUR TIME!

INSTITUTIONS ATTENDED: Please list in this section all of the institutions of higher education that you have EVER attended. This section is meant for the colleges that you have attended. Community colleges are acceptable as well. Any place that you have taken college courses are to be listed. There is no requirement that you must have graduated from all of them. You ar to list all schools of which you might have transferred from. In this section there is room to list the subject matter that you were studying at each school and the time period that you were in attendance. Finally you have to indicate if you graduated, what year and with what degree.

COURSEWORK: Though it is really hard to pour your heart and soul in to a narrative or dig up every minute or experience for HRE and PCE, all of those pale in comparison with having to list EVERY COLLEGE CLASS THAT YOU HAVE EVER TAKEN. You not only have to list the name of the class as it appeared in the course enrollment, but also the grade that you received, the credits that it was worth and the type of class that was taken (i.e biology, chem, non-science or regular)….oh yeah and remember to list the year and semester that they were taken.

This section is not hard it is just tedious. To remedy this problem you are going to have to request copies of your transcripts from all of the colleges that you have ever taken a class at. While you are requesting these transcripts, remember to request an official copy of each be sent to CASPA as they are going to need a copy to verify all  of the information that you are putting it is indeed correct. Check your list of classes and then check it again…..any mistake or apparent difference between the information that you put in vs. the official transcript CASPA receives will cause a delay in the compounding of your grades for a natural science GPA and an over all GPA which CASPA will derive before your applications are ever sent out to schools.

REFERENCES: This section is not hard. The best way of going about it is lining up three letters of reference early. You have to have three and it is recommended that either all three be PA’s or at least 2 PA’s and 1 Doctor. Online you list their names, titles, addresses, telephone number and their email. CASPA will generate an email to them which will include a link to a web page where they can type out the letter of recommendation and electronically sign it. The letter of reference will take a couple days to post before posting to your CASPA online appliacation as submitted and accepted.  As a general rule it is better to line up these letters of recommendation early….as you don’t want your application finished yet still incomplete because you are waiting on someone else.

digest these sections…..

INFO TO COME:

programs/picking schools. interviews. acceptance letters………

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CASPA Application Breakdown (Part 1)

Friday, May 29th, 2009

When applying to a Physician Assistant Program there are many facets but almost all of which begin with the CASPA Online Application. CASPA is an acronym for Central Application Service for Physician Assistants. There are 127 programs (as of 2009) that require this single application in order to apply to their program. It is a generic application that when filled out delivers all of the needed background information about the applicant.

The application is available for completion upon the first of May and is saved until the end of the application year which normally ends in April of the following year. No information is saved from year to year. At the end of the application year,   CASPA will automatically generate an email informing you that you have til the end of April to print out your application or save it to your own computer in order to fill it out in the next application year with more ease.  I was accepted in my first application year but found in helpful and informative to print out my application for future reference and to show others what the application is all about.

CASPA is a service that you subscribe to. With your log-in and password you are able to work on your application when ever you are able. Most applications are due in the fall (October 1st) though there are some varied due dates ranging from November through March. Given that you are able to start working on your application in May…..and the applications for the earliest programs are due in July (though rare) this is still more than enough time to get the application and your letters of reference together.

A simple break down of the application goes as follows:

CONTACT INFORMATION: In this section you present your Name, Email, Title, Address, Phone Number, and the User name that is the first part of your email address that CASPA will use to contact you. This email address is usually a school email address for those that are currently taking classes. The reason for a school email is that there are usually better filters and less junk mail so that notifications from CASPA are not relocated in junk mail folder and systematically deleted. The use of other email addresses are fine, it is just important to sort through junk mail as notifications of  letters or reference having been received are automatically generated.

PERSONAL DATA: In this section you delcare your Citizenship Status, Gender, DOB (Date of Birth), Ethnicity, Birth Country, Birth State, High School, Year of Graduation, Highest Degree Earned, Professional Certifications (If any), and any applicable Tests (MCAT, GRE, TOEFL). This is basic information that you are going to have to provide to any program and enjoy these previous two sections because they only become more labor intensive as you move forward.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: In this section you are allowed to boast a bit in the Honors and Awards section. Things that I included were any leadership experiences i.e…. Captain  of  the  Soccer and Track, President of the Latin Club, College Sailing Team. Also honors and awards can be looked not so much as the result of being voted by your peers or but simple things like a motorcycle licence, N.A.U.I. Dive Certification. It is important to know that having a licence of any sort is a privilege to operate in a certain manner and you have been awarded that by a governing body of which you have put in the time and effort to achieve and maintain your status as a safe and effective individual within some rule set.

Also, within Additional Information there are simple Yes/No questions about Military Experience, Have you already attended a PA Program, Any notable Disciplinary action taken against you, conviction of a misdemeanor or felonly, or ever had any certification or licence revoked?

This section is not meant to be hard. If you think and work at it there are a lot of life experiences that we participate in all the time that provide certifications and licenses upon our hard work. Health field licenses or certifications should be exempt from this section as you are able to more properly place those in another section later on in the application. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT IN THE CASPA APPLICATION TO NOT LIST ANYTHING TWICE. There are some sections whereby you are able to attribute an experience or clinical time to more than one section but you MUST divide up the clinical hours that you spent between between the two sections appropriately.

(Aside) To better explain this…take for example if I had worked for 2 years as a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA). On my CASPA Application I have the opportunity to list this full-time job as either “Patient Contact Experience” and/or “Health Related Experience”. 2ooo hours per year X 2 years = 4000 hours ….I have 4000 hours to list and I am better off separating my hours and splitting my time accordingly between the two experiences. This might take more time that you would like but this application is the application that you will be judged on.  (If you don’t have the time to do it correctly, you probably don’t have the right mentality to do right by your patients either…..so I’d stop and think for a bit)

HEALTH RELATED TRAINING: In this section you list training or classes that you have taken that are based more in clinical practice or safety. Examples of this would be  BLS/CPR or ACLS (Advanced Cardiac Life Support) training, Phlebotomy Coursework, Non-Violent Crisis Intervention, EMT course and the like. After listing the training that you have there is a follow up question that will ask you if you recieved a certification for successful completion of the training…..yes/no.

This is an obvious case in which more is better. Training and especially training that is not required for your clinical experiences is heavily desired. Additional training beyond your scope of practice displays interest and a desire to advance. It is very important that the training that you list should you have earned a certification is up do date current. It is hard not to exaggerate or inflate your application but you must know that this is  going to be read and if you are privileged enough to be offered an interview, no stone will be left unturned.

NARRATIVE: This is not your undergraduate college essay. THIS IS NOT YOUR UNDERGRADUATE COLLEGE ESSAY. Having said that here is why….

In my undergraduate college essay I wrote about catching frogs. I ended up majoring in philosophy with a focus on medical ethics. There is no connection between the two and there needed no reason to be one. In your college essay you could have written about anything. ANYTHING. The admissions board at Where-ever-you-went University just wanted to make sure that you knew how to formulate a sentence, use correct punctuation and when asked to write about anything you didn’t include your penchant underage drinking or fetish for arson.

Your CASPA essay should be an informative glimpse in to your motivation for wanting to be a PA! There was some emphasis behind wanting to BE a PA because at the end of school that is what you are going to actually be. There are thousands of people that graduate from law school and never practicse law. There are plenty of wonderful reasons to be educated in Law with relation to one’s end career or eventual goal. The only goal of a Physician Assistant program is to become a physician assistant. Your essay should refelect this. Your wanting help others, heal others and your movitation behind wanting to take time and teach the importance of preventative medicine to the underserved is REALLY important. The essay should be formulated like any other essay….I want to give you the freedom to present your passion and desire to practice in the field in your own way. A narrative is what they ask for. Make sure the end product reflects and fulfills the requirements (word count, use the very max) and speeks volumes about who you are and why you’re appliying.

This is the first part of the CASPA Application  advice…….more to come

tonyc@paexperience.com

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