Hello Everyone,
The last few weeks have been crazy for me even though we have been on break. I am working on some financial things, and I’ve been getting ready for clinic. In my last post, I said that I would talk about the “breaks” that you get in PA school, which I see that Taneisha has described a little for you, but I will elaborate.
When you start the program in the fall, the first break that you get to look forward to is “fall break,” which was a new concept to me when I came to Shenandoah University. What they’ve decided to do to give students more of a mid-term break from classes is to split the traditional week off that some universities allow for Thanksgiving break. Instead of that full week, SU closes the university for two days in October and then three days around Thanksgiving. At first, I thought to myself “what?! I want my full week!!” but then, as school started to get hectic, it was very nice to have those two days at the beginning of October to catch up right after or just before big midterm exams. I guess I left out that Labor Day Monday comes before fall break and Thanksgiving break, but everyone knows about that one. After Thanksgiving break, during your didactic year, you get the typical winter/Christmas break that goes from the end of the semester to the beginning of the spring which is typically 3-4 weeks depending on how the university has scheduled the semesters. After the spring semester, you get three weeks before the start of you summer classes. However, if you choose to go on the Nicaragua medical mission trip, one of your weeks will be spent in Nicaragua, which is what I did. After the fast paced, ten week, summer semester, you get two weeks before the start of your final didactic semester. Once you finish your last semester in the didactic year, you get approximately 3 weeks of winter break before you begin clinical rotations. This confuses some people because you start clinical rotations before the university starts their semester officially. For instance, this year the university opens again on January 11th, but we started clinic this week on the 4th. It is arranged this way so that you can have full 6 week rotations. Once you start the clinical year, the university schedule becomes somewhat irrelevant to you as a PA student – no more snow days, no more holidays officially (if your doc works, then you work) etc. During the clinical year, you get a week around May to relax after your third rotation. Then you get another break in September after your 6th rotation. After your 6th rotation, you take the final OSCE for the program, hopefully finish your scholarly project, and then go on your final 10 week community preceptorship, which is designed to place you in an underserved area in a family medicine/primary care location so that you have more experience with long-term patient care such as follow up and disease monitoring. Once that is finished and you pass your second PACKRAT exam, and you present your scholarly project, then you are well on your way to graduating with a Masters in Physician Assistant studies. It’s up to you after that to go take the PANCE and get certified J
I also said in my last post that I would talk about success in the didactic year since I seem to have made it through (alive and well I might add).
The first thing that you can really do is to understand that studying in PA school and studying in undergrad or even some other graduate level programs are very different. Some people may keep a few old study habits such as: studying with music, always studying at the library, studying alone or in groups, reading the book or highlighting everything in the notes with 20 different highlighters. Those habits might actually carry over from undergrad, but they will all be tweaked of course. The thing that’s different about PA school is the amount of material that you have to get through. It is my thought that anyone who gets into the PA program could definitely handle the difficulty of the material handed to them; however, it is the amount of material that people cannot handle. For instance, anatomy isn’t necessarily a difficult subject. The human body hasn’t changed much and the field of anatomy stays fairly consistent, and anyone could learn and understand the muscles in the forearm if they were given ample time to study it and memorize it for hours. In PA school, you have to learn the forearm muscles along with the shoulder and the hand as well as all of the nerves, actions, blood supply etc. Our anatomy instructor describes it as trying to take a drink from a fire hydrant. It’s just a lot of information at once, not necessarily difficult information. My point with all of this is that studying becomes your new job, and you have to find a consistent and effective way to do it. My study habits changed for every semester and it made me crazy. I would say by summer and the final fall semester was when I finally started to get it together, which is why I struggled a little in the spring semester. The most important thing I can tell anyone is to find an organized way to put your notes and your classes together and decide what works for you. If having everything in a folder on your laptop and only studying from your laptop works for you then good, if you need all the notes in a binder and you have to highlight everything 300 times (like me) then do that. If you need to quiz one another in a group setting (which I would only recommend after ample studying) then do that. Hint: getting in a group to study and talk things over only works if you have done some studying yourself. You cannot walk into a group study session and expect to pick up enough information by listening or quizzing that will get you a passing grade on an exam – trust me!
My routine by the end of the didactic year was to get the syllabi for each course and go buy a 3-ring binder for each course. After that, I would take the course schedule for each course and put all of the due dates and projects on a calendar that I could see on my way out the door each day (my classmates used Microsoft Outlook calendar – but I tend to ignore my computer and it takes too long to set up for me). I also added to that calendar any commitments that I had whether they related to the program or personal commitments. Seeing when your exams are and when papers are due etc. really helps you plan your studying, and of course, you don’t want to miss something. It also saves you from being the kid in the class who is always asking “What is that? When is that due? When are we doing that?” During class, you are typically presented with PowerPoint presentations, which work well for lecture, but I cannot study from them to save my life. Luckily, we had a girl in our class who changed all of the PowerPoint presentations into word documents. I would print them, three-hole punch them, and put them in the appropriate binder in the order that we were lectured on them. If someone in the class read a chapter from the book and typed notes and sent it out, I would add that to my binder as well in the appropriate related area. Then, when I read a section from the book I would hand write extra notes to whatever notes I had printed. Taking notes on the computer from the reading did nothing for me because I would just be transcribing, so I needed to write those notes. If you are a regimented person, you will get through the assigned reading and the lecture notes before every exam. If you are like me, you will read the lecture notes, read any notes sent out by a classmates, and go through the reading and pick out things that you were confused about or facts that jump out at you. If you are an even better student, you will read the assigned reading before class just like they’ve been telling you to do since high school… if you can, do that. Having a framework to “hang” the information a lecturer gives you is truly the best way to retain information, but sometimes you just don’t get to it J Also, if you are accepted into the program, you will be part of a class as a cohort, which I’ve described before. It is crucial to your classes success that you be there for one another, don’t get too cliquey, and help one another with the material. Divide and Conquer! It’s not cheating to share notes, and there is no valedictorian. The goal is to graduate.
Well enough for now…I am off to Typhon (which is a new verb that I have learned in 2010). Typhon is our patient tracking software where we keep track of all of the patients that we see during the clinical year.
Good luck in your interviews and applications this spring if you’re reading this!
Happy New Year!
Josh
