What I Wish I Knew Before Starting PA School - Rebecca C., PA-C

Hi All! My name is Becca Corbett, PA-C and I am a recent graduate of Northeastern University’s PA program. I graduated and took my PANCE in October 2021 and will be starting my first job as a hospitalist PA in April 2022.

Prior to PA school I was a biology major with a pre-health professions concentration and pre-PA track at Gordon College in Massachusetts. I stumbled on the PA profession in my sophomore year and absolutely fell in love, switching to the pre-PA track from my previously declared pre-med. From there I got my CNA license in the Summer between my sophomore and junior years and started working at skilled nursing facilities doing both long term and rehab care during my school vacations. In my senior year, I finished up my classes part time, worked part time as a CNA at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital on their pulmonary/ventilator floor and got my EMT license during my Spring semester at a local community college. I ended up applying the Summer after I graduated in 2018 in order to have enough PCE to be competitive as a PA school applicant, and proceeded to work part time as a CNA and EMT until I started at Northeastern in 2019!

All that being said, my undergrad school was quite small, and while we had a pre-PA track, we had no pre-PA organization to help with advice before PA school. I felt like there was a lot of information that I wish I had known before starting on the pre-PA track, or PA school specifically, and I’d love to share with you some of the biggest things I learned along the way!

Your PCE? It matters. A lot.

PCE (patient care experience) can feel frustrating at times. You are working on gaining a bachelor’s degree in biology, chemistry, kinesiology, exercise science, or any of the many other degrees that usually lead to the PA profession, but you find yourself working at the bottom of the proverbial medical food chain. It’s frustrating when you understand some of the medicine and diseases around you, but your job is to assist patients in ADLs (activities of daily living), scribe, take blood pressures, write histories in the back of an ambulance…you get my point. It feels like there’s a gap, and you aren’t living up to your full potential. But guess what, that’s ok! While being a CNA, I remember endless long days cleaning up code browns (iykyk) asking myself what I was doing with my life. But once I left my job to start school, I found myself desperately missing my patients and the feeling of being needed and useful when someone needed me there to lean on during their worst days. My time as a CNA and EMT taught me patient care and empathy. PA school will teach you medicine, they’ll teach you how to be a professional, and they’ll teach you the logistics of how to establish good patient rapport. But these things come with time, and experience, and that’s where your PCE is absolutely invaluable. So if you’re stuck in a rut feeling like you’re not living up to your full potential, it will come in time. I promise.

You will know what you need to know when you need to know it, but you will never know everything, and that’s ok.

Somewhere between getting your acceptance and starting PA school you’ll get this feeling that you need to study to be prepared to even start. Don’t. If you’re type A like me, maybe brush up on basic anatomy and medical terminology just to keep your mind active but PA school will teach you everything you need to know right from square one.

You’ll also feel like you may be behind some of your classmates. This classmate worked as a medic for 5 years, that person was a medical assistant for 10, oh and they have 100 hours of shadowing in addition to 4,000 as a surgical tech. Don’t worry. Your experience, no matter what it was, was enough to get you in the door of PA school and quite honestly the day you start, you will all be on equal footing. Sure the person sitting next to you spent 2 years working in dermatology, but they don’t have the emergency medicine experience that you have. It all works out in the end and you are by no means “behind” just because you come from diverse backgrounds.

“Trust the Process.” Depending on where you go to school you will hear this over and over again. It becomes a motto that is simultaneously comforting and frustrating. When you first start, some say PA school feels like “drinking from a firehose” and that’s definitely an understatement. You’ll have so much new knowledge, some that you’ve been exposed to before, most that you haven’t, and connecting the dots feels impossible. But at some point, a lightbulb is going to go off in your head and it will all make sense. I wish I knew that at any given time, it was ok that I didn’t know it all. It was ok that I wasn’t making connections yet. But by the time I reached exams? Clinicals? The PANCE? I had the knowledge that I needed. It was a process, and I knew what I needed to know when I needed to know it.

At the same time, recognize that you will never be expected to know everything. There’s a reason why it’s called practicing medicine. Medicine is an art. It’s dynamic and changing and you can’t possibly learn it all regardless of if you go for PA, NP, MD, etc. Push yourself, but also realize that PA-Cs that have been practicing for 20, 30, 40+ years are still learning every day. And in a way? That’s beautiful, and part of why I love medicine.

In the end, it will all be worth it.

You’ll have those days spending countless hours studying in the library during undergrad to get a decent grade in organic chemistry and wonder if it’s all worth it.

You’ll start your first job as an EMT and wonder if those long 16 hour shifts are really worth it to get into PA school.

You’ll start grad school and feel like everything is impossible to memorize and it’s just too much, and again wonder if the time and effort is worth it.

You’ll start clinicals and feel like you’ll never feel comfortable as a practicing provider, and wonder if this was all worth it.

You’ll start studying for the PANCE even after graduation, looking back on all the information you learned in two years, and wonder if this is still worth it.

Yes. 1,000 times. Yes.

Because in the in between? You will have learned how to prevent disease. How to diagnose terminal illnesses before it’s too late. How to listen when someone is having the worst day of their life. How to recognize when someone needs help. You will have learned how to save a life.

It’s worth it. I promise.

Good luck to you all on your PA journeys! Feel free to follow me on Instagram @rebecca.the.pa and reach out if there’s anything you need! Just remember, you got this!

Best,

Becca Corbett, PA-C