The Never-ending First Post

I wanted to start a blog at the beginning of PA school, but the more aggressive priorities pushed themselves to the top of the list. LIKE THE START OF PA SCHOOL. I’ve been in this program for 2 months, and I’m pretty sure that an anatomy god, I’m thinking it was Netters, said, “It is time.” It’s time to capture the moments, the heartaches, and my struggles/triumphs during PA school.

So lets start at the beginning. Preparing for school included finding roommates and ordering books. Besides that there was a minor prerequisite, which was nothing… you know, just to graduate from college. But lets rewind a couple of months.

My interview day was November 3rd, which was the most nerve-wrecking day of my life. Just kidding, it wasn’t that bad. I was nervous beforehand, especially since I was wearing very un-marian clothing. A beautiful Tehani skirt suit. I didn’t feel entirely comfortable, since I was used to wearing nice dress slacks, cardigan, and tank top. I had business casual dress down to an art. I strolled into the Stony Brook Hospital and I was welcomed by first year students and some of the other applicants. Although the next five hours went by extremely quickly, I tried to slow myself down as much as possible. I had driven 6 hours, stayed at a hotel, and was now undergoing THE INTERVIEW; I needed things to slow down. I spoke calmly through all three interviews, and I managed to stay relatively fluent/sane. I enjoyed the experience, as well as all the other applicants I met during the interview. Now, I have to say one thing, I have always loved the PA applicants that I’ve met. This strange phenomena told me that i had finally chosen the right path. (I switched my focus several times during undergrad…you don’t even want to know…) After being in PA school for two months, I’ve decided that our health care system is crap and that becoming a PA is still something that was meant to be.

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JULY 2009
Orientation for the Health Technology and Management school was today. Students from the PT, OT, Respiratory Care, Clinical Laboratory Sciences, and PA programs met up for a rather enthusiastic introduction to the school. It was a long day of orienting, but I had the chance to interact with people from other programs, which was pretty sweet. I’m all for meeting new people. Through the long, boring subjects like changes to HIPAA under Obama, I wish that I had a sodoku puzzle to solve. I WAS a good listener though, and paid attention to everything. Yay for me. It’s kind of ridiculous, although necessary, the new laws they are enforcing. For example, if you provide patient information to anyone outside of the healtchare field, you WILL be fined 1.4 million. That’s not all. You also will be in prison for 20+ years. If you accidentally drop a piece of patient information on the floor, you’ll be charged $200 for each piece of info on the paper. Redic. Anyways, it was interesting and I want to check out the new laws that will go into effect in August. After the huge orientation, we broke off for the catered lunch. I love free food. We get free Long Island bagels tomorrow. YESSS! Anyways, after food, we had the Fish! Philosophy presentation. Let it be known, I have seen >4 presentations of this already. Aside from the LONG 2 hour Fish! presentation, I was very productive. I set up my checking account with the Federal Credit Union on campus. I bought my scrubs, core concepts book, and dissection tools. Yay for productivity! Alright, I just wanted to give you all an overview of my day. Hopefully, I’ll be more consistent with my entries in the future.

Summary: Great day!
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Anatomy ended at the end of August, which was very bittersweet. I wanted to visit Boston, but on the other hand I absolutely loved my lab group and anatomy.

So I know people are going to ask me…what was it like, was it difficult, did you have free time…so let me go ahead and answer all those questions.

What was it like? The semester started at the end of June and consisted of only two classes: Professional Ethics and Gross Anatomy. Professional ethics was interesting, although somewhat tedious at times. Okay, maybe at the time I thought the class consisted of material I already knew, but it’s a good and necessary base to have in every PA program. If anything, it brought our class closer together through the projects and the enforced ’sit to someone new’ rule.

As for anatomy, was it difficult? It was do-able and fair. The anatomy professors at SBU were absolutely amazing. During my undergrad at University of Maryland, I didn’t get very close to many of my professors, aside from the ones that participated in my Alaska ’study-abroad’ trip. In anatomy, your experience is totally different. They know your name, as well as whether you sleep in class or not. (as indicated by a classmates name and his sleeping habits as a question on one of the exams.) There were 26 bodies dispersed throughout my class of PA, PT, OT, and RC students. In my group, there were four PT students and an RC. I had gotten really close to my group, and i actually miss them come to think of it…they were great. Now as for the exams… there was a lecture and lab exam. If you studied everything and knew all the parts of each structure, then you were gold. The multiple choice was straightforward on all of the exams, except for the first which felt a bit harder than the others…probably because it was the first exam. The summer was particularly great because there was time to go to the beach, although we all know we didn’t take advantage of it enough. Although I would recommend to future students to GO to the beach…it’s difficult to say because we all worked incredibly hard to do well on the exams. If you have great time management skills, then you know what..take that break at the beach. Go study at the beach if you can, just know who you are and what works for you.