Ashley is back for the second part of her series about preparing for PA School Applications. She wrote a guest post last year about preparing for PA School Applications as a Freshman and is back with advice for those in their sophomore year of college. Follow Ashley’s journey at @akoch_coke
Throughout the ending of my freshman year in college, I continued to prioritize my studies along with staying an active member within my university’s Pre-PA Club. However, once March began everything changed. A couple weeks before my Spring Break, I was notified by my school that I needed to be moved out of my dorm by the ending of the following day due to the corona virus. Although there were so many things going through my mind within this moment, I never stopped to realize how much this then termed global pandemic would affect my entire Pre-PA activities and requirement fulfillments.
After leaving my dorm, the rest of my semester consisted of finishing my classes as strongly as possible and trying to find something to do during the summer. Originally, I had set in my summer schedule to be shadowing a surgery PA, which at the time was the specialty I was obsessing over. However, this plan was soon canceled due to the corona virus.
Once summer began, I admittingly spent a lot of the beginning time on the app Tik-Tok where I eventually stumbled upon a couple of online programs for Pre-PA and general Pre-Healthcare students to get a variety of shadowing and seminar experiences. I ended up participating in Lenox Hill Hospital’s BRAINterns seminar series along with a couple of Medshu Club’s profession sessions. These two programs were very exciting to be a part of due to the fact that they allowed me to learn more about different healthcare professional’s careers and specialties. Along with this, in the BRAINterns series there were several days per week where some of their doctors would present a case they encountered and run through how they diagnosed and treated the patients along with talk through recorded surgeries within some of these cases. Along with these online programs, I was also taking an online course for school to help boost my GPA and dedicating spare free time to learning about how to read an EKG.
Towards the beginning of my sophomore year, my school’s Pre-PA club was re-electing officers, and I became the new president of the Pre-PA club. In this position, I discussed with the fellow officers about our plans for the upcoming semester and everything we would like to do. Throughout the semester, we had several virtual club meetings that consisted of us reviewing one of the key requirements for most PA schools. During one of our final meetings of the semester, one of the people on our college’s PA admissions team attended!
Along with my position as president of PA club, I also joined Biology club and Medlife club which were both very fun. As the semester progressed, I found myself constantly working on my schoolwork and having very little social time. Although my school was and still is the top priority, I was still wanting to have some time to spend with new friends. Because of this, I decided to informally rush and join a sorority, Alpha Delta Pi. Through this, I not only met many girls that were on the same profession path as me, but also will get to continue volunteering at the Ronald McDonald House through not only PA club but now also ADPi. Even though this semester consisted of being half in person and half online, with extra hard work I ended up boosting my GPA and making Dean’s List.
Once the semester ended and Christmas Break was around the corner, I was eagerly awaiting to start gaining my shadowing hours scheduled during the break. However, within a couple days of my first day I received a notice from the PA stating that I would be unable to shadow her due to case numbers rising. Although this news was very heartbreaking, I decided to start partially preparing for potential PA school interviews through reading The PA Platform’s “Interview Guide” book and taking diligent notes on the different types of interview styles. While to some this preparing sounds to be way too early, my mindset was by the time I get invited to interview at a PA school, I will already have detailed information on all of the different interview styles and expectations so this way I can focus more on how to answer the potential questions for the specific school instead of how the interview will be conducted. Along with this, I also added several new spreadsheets to my list of PA school requirements one that consisted of my logged virtual hours from the past summer, my grades throughout my completed semesters so far, list of my planned extracurriculars for each semester so I don’t sign up for more than I can handle and planned out class schedules for my remaining semesters in order to not have too many hard sciences at the same time.
Toward the beginning of this semester, I found out days before that the EMT class I scheduled to take in order to attain PCE hours got canceled due to the fact that not enough people registered. This cancellation on top of the several shadowing and volunteering opportunities I had already lost hurt and made me feel hopeless, that I would never fulfill PA school requirements. However, even though these cancellations happened, I was able to make use of my now free time to put it towards other areas of the application. Currently, I am in the process of potentially starting to shadow a PA along with volunteering at a local hospital near my college. Along with this, I am also planning out an exciting semester for my college’s Pre-PA club alongside my fellow club officers and completing training to start working in a glioblastoma research project.
Even though it is still a very challenging time to fulfill application requirements, with hard work and determination there will be opportunities to not only fulfill these but to also show future PA schools that you are worthy of becoming a Physician Assistant.
