CU's PA Program is Officially Awesome

So I meant to put up a post when I got home on Friday and then things got away from me. I've officially begun the search for a good PA program and to organize the effort to get in! I've thought about it a lot over the past year or so, I've shadowed a couple of PA's (ones in family practice and one who does ortho surgery), I've talked to docs who've been in the profession long enough to sense which way the sands are shifting, and I'm pretty well there. I know from the message boards that PA's exist who hate their jobs because they would rather be docs, but those who thoughtfully weighed their decision between the two, evaluated the differences and came out on the side of PA are really, really happy.

On the MD side is my ego and the fear that maybe I am able to only work for myself. On the PA side is getting to do the part of the job I love the most (diagnose and treat) while not having to mess with the responsibility of a practice, of getting to work with a doc so there is someone to bounce difficult cases off of, 4-5 years of training as opposed to twice that, the ability to pick up and change specialties as easily as changing jobs instead of having to complete a whole new residency if I end up not liking what I'm doing, etc. etc. In short, it looks like it will fit into the life I want, instead of requiring me to dedicate and conform my life to it. Sure, there are specialties you can choose if you prefer to "dabble" in medicine: radiology or maybe physiatry, ER can be pretty flex too. But still. The more I learn the more excited I get, and I don't think I've felt this excited since I realized I needed to go to acupuncture school. Being a PA will, of course, mean that I will not only still be able to be an acupunk I will be able to get to people who would otherwise not think to try it in a million years. It will satisfy my need to integrate the two worlds. I can work with overseas and underserved populations that as an LAc are years away. And so on and so on.

So I visited my first program on Friday. Holy shit! The medical campus makes up for being in the middle of east Jesus nowhere by being all sparkly clean and new, and by having all kinds of cool stuff like a standardized patient program and high tech mannequins for practicing procedures and treatment scenarios. In the gross anatomy classes you only share your cadaver with 3 other students and you don't rotate--you get to do a full dissection. They have overseas rotations including India, Ghana, and a Spanish immersion in Costa Rica. You can put together your own rotations if there's someplace you'd like to work and they are open to it. You have the advantages of going to a school that also has a medical school, dental school, nursing, PT, etc. schools and all the professional resources that those provide. They work integratively with some of the other schools so you begin to get a sense of what it really means to work as a team.

Predictably, it is competitive. 600 applicants compete for about 100 interviews and about 40 of those get spots. I have my work cut out for me as I plan my prereq courses and start prepping to retake the GRE (sadly my awesome previous score is so 1998) early next year. It will be at least 2 years out, but I'm so excited sometimes it's hard to sleep at night. I am still a dork.

A very, excited and purpose-driven dork.