The Physician Assistant Experience

……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………