PA school

[OrionGrad]

I know nothing about PA school and very little about personal statements, but I'm really excited for you! Please keep us posted along the way!!

[scrub-jay]

I can be another set of eyes if you want/need. Cheering you on!!

[Sheherezade]

I'm thinking 5000 characters is around 7 paragraphs? 470 characters is the limit of length of an FB post. Z personal statements for college were limited to 2000 words. It's a lot of space.

If the system is anything like the Common App for colleges, you will want to write it, format it and then just cut and paste the sucker in to the system when you are applying. There are a lot of formatting and word count errors in online text editors at least there were in the Common App!!

Congratulations!! You will be an awesome PA.

[WolfpackWife]

^^ can confirm. As someone who has churned out countless research papers during grad school, I can confirm that ~2000 is approx. 7-8 pages.

[Vanquisher]

It's not words. It's characters. Short.

[WolfpackWife]

It's not words. It's characters. Short.

Oh yeah, I caught that early on. I was just following up on Sheherezade's comment where it looked like she was extrapolating the character limit to approximate length (using college applications as an example). Characters will not be too lengthy at all. They'd be complete masochists by requesting 5000 WORD essays from their applicants. Holy crap, so many pages.

[BonBon]

So excited for you!! Is it for this fall?

Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

[Vanquisher]

No. Unforch. Matriculation would be May 2015 in a 27 month program. 15 months are classroom didactic learning. The last 12 are clinical rotations.

[Curegirl]

Yay! 2,000 characters is about a couple of paragraphs or so depending on how much punctuation you use. I helped a bunch of peeps for college and grad school apps so we were up to here with character and word counts!

[Vanquisher]

5000 characters! LOL.

[Curegirl]

Ha! Sorry, I was dealing with plumbing issues while reading that. 5,000 should take you almost 2 pages give or take. MLA format right?

[Vanquisher]

Here is a very, very, very rough, first draft. Please be easy on me.




I have been a “physician assistant” for a decade now. In 2004, my husband of seventeen years graduated from medical school. I do not mean this play-on-words to be derogatory of the Physician Assistant profession or the professionals themselves in any way. I merely seek to highlight my understanding of the dedication, sacrifice, efforts, tribulations, and triumphs involved in becoming a medical professional. It is through this lens that I have focused my aspirations and know with conviction that I truly want to be a physician assistant.

My journey to this point has been circuitous. I’ve always been interested in medicine, sciences, and the human body, and knew from a young age that I wanted to pursue a career in medicine. Life has a funny way of getting in the way of your plans though, doesn’t it? Instead of following the more traditional route of most hopeful physician assistant applicants, I chose a different path. I focused on my young family. I put my career aspirations on the back-burner and instead concentrated on raising my two children and supporting my husband throughout his application to medical school, matriculation, studies, graduation, internship, residency, and fellowship.

HELP – I might want to talk a bit more about my family here. I want to talk about how it affected my grades -- having a newborn while I was in college and a difficult pregnancy. Why I had the family early, maybe (fertility issues)? Also, how it was a bit prohibitive for me to pursue my own career because of all this? I also with the same sentiment, want to emphasize what a support they will be to me now that I am older, more experienced, and ready. They won’t be a detriment. I have to talk about my family and especially Chad cause its all my health care experience.

While he was in medical school, I can recall countless nights helping my husband study. I would quiz him on chemotherapy pharmacology using flash cards, genetic disorders from a thick and unruly textbook, and ask him hundreds of questions from online question banks while we were driving. I would allow him to hone his skills with an otoscope and ophthalmoscope on my ears and eyes. In residency, I would help him prepare for conferences and in-service exams. I bought bananas and oranges for him to practice suturing techniques on. I have listened and been there for him after thirty-six hour on-call shifts, losing a treasured patient, or just when he is trying to plan for a difficult surgical case. Unequivocally, I have learned a bit of medicine just by being around it and attentive to it for as long as I have. However, I have mostly learned how much I do not know, have left to learn, and what it truly takes to be a medical professional.

For the past four years, I have been a medical assistant, co-owner, and practice manager in my husband’s orthopaedic surgery practice. I understand, intimately, a wide aspect of what goes on in a clinical practice. From taking a patient’s medical history, obtaining and recording vital signs, drawing up steroid injections, and assisting in sterile procedures to credentialing a provider for Medicare, coding an office visit or surgery with appropriate modifiers, and purchasing malpractice coverage, I have a unique breadth of experience and perspective on medical care. All of this experience and my life experience propels me to practice clinical medicine. I want to be a clinical provider. I want to be a part of a healthcare team. I want to evaluate histories, signs and symptoms of illness. I want to formulate treatment plans and help to implement care. I want to collaborate with physician assistants, physicians, and nurse practitioners. I want to be a physician assistant.



Help and thoughts, please.

[ladymoreta]

I'm so excited for you! I think your statement sounds great. I'll leave the advice to the more experienced editors.

[poky]

Overall, it sounds good.

Just my nitpicky suggestions, and what I'd do, none of this is "oh, god you HAVE to change that, it's horrible!":

I'd change "...in the way of your plans, though, doesn't it?" to "...in the way of plans, though." that kind of use of "your" is a pet peeve of mine, and the "doesn't it?" seems a little cutesy, to me.
thirty-six-hour should have that second hyphen.
I might change "Unequivocally" to "Inevitably"..the meaning seems to fit a little better with the surrounding words.
I *love* the last paragraph, except for the phrase "a wide aspect", which just sounds wrong to me. I might change it to something like "most aspects" or just "most".

[Vanquisher]

Thank you! What should I do in the middle? Should I add that stuff in?