<p>apply to Physician assistance school or DO school.</p>
<p>Entrance into Physician Assistant school is very competitive as well. You need a good GPA, good GREs (for most schools) healthcare experience and letters of recommendation. There are many, many good applicants for few seats.</p>
<p>“After you graduate, move to a large city and find a job as a pharmacist. Apply to medical school PART TIME. This will be much less competitive since all part time applicants will live in the area and you will have industry experience. Just a thought…”
-In addition to the fact that PART TIME Medical schools do not exist, it is extremely hard to find a job as a pharmacist any more. Another point to consider, what moving to the large city has anything to do with the goal of becoming an MD? This suggestion is very unclear.</p>
<p>Why not try being a nurse practitioner if you want to go into medicine? It’s hardly as prestigious as being a doctor, but the ones that work with my mom all seem to make a good living.</p>
<p>So you think that being a NP or PA is equivalent of being a physician? Why do you think that it takes so much longer to be a physician? Is it simply that the applicants to become medical doctors are that much slower mentally, or is it that there’s more to learn than symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment?</p>
<p>For example, I have a headache. 90+% of people who have brain tumors have headaches. Thus, I have a brain tumor… However, the vast majority of people with headaches do not have brain tumors. Is it a possibility, yes. But not the likely cause. </p>
<p>NP and PA’s can be incredibly smart, but the overall likelihood of one performing better than a MD or DO is low. There are poor-quality physicians whom are eclipsed by physicians themselves. If your training was to treat the normal 90% of hypertension, you may be excellent at that. However, your treatment in the other 10% may be poor or irresponsible…</p>
<p>People say that nothing can’t be obtained with enough experience. However, medicine isn’t just experience; it’s more about fitting multiple symptoms into a cohesive picture about one’s heath. I’m of the opinion that most (but not all) PA’s and NP’s aren’t trained to do that. And while it’s just a degree, it’s also a benchmark that’s been tried and tested to provide adequate healthcare in our society for centuries at this point. </p>
<p>I can easily write a computer program to dictate what to do for essential hypertension, but its much more difficult to determine why the 26 year old in your clinic has HTN. NP’s and PA’s are essentially programs designed to treat the majority of problems that you’ll see in practice, and you hope that they know enough to let the physician know when something seems strange. I foresee a huge problem in the future when most primary care providers are NP/PA’s. Again, they can be excellent in providing continued care, but they can’t necessarily see the zebras from the horses, and that alone is going to reaffirm physicians as primary care providers in the future after, sadly, enough deaths take place.</p>
<p>Nurses are a great resource and given the shortage currently, I wish that many more qualified people would become them. But they’re not physicians. They never will be. A singular nurse can be good, but nurses by and of themselves are not physicians. Nor are PA’s, or CRNAs, or NPs. Every physician, at least at my institution, would argue that he or she has not only done the job of a physician, but also of the nurse taking care of the patient and corrected something that should have either been brought to the physician’s attention or fixed via their current orders.</p>
<p>Anyway, long story short, there are plenty of heath care jobs available and needed in our society. If you want to dictate the plan of action, become the physician. If you can’t be one, become a nurse or PA, but realize that you’re not the physician and that you’re essentially someone who follows someone else’s orders. You’re not the equivalent of a physician, but that’s OK. You’re someone who can help most normal progressions of disease, but there’s a physician there for any larger problems. That’s why physicians exist.</p>
<p>So please become a nurse, or a PA, or a NP… We need your talents and are thankful for them. But please don’t delude yourself and think that you’re a physician. You’re not.</p>
<p>You can re-take the classes and get a better grade. That should ‘wipe out’ the previous grades (providing the new grades are above the ones you earned before).</p>
<p>If you get an A in those classes, your GPA will be improved.</p>
<p>^Just a note, you can’t replace grades for AMCAS. So if you earned a C in a class, and you retake it and get an A, both the C and the A are calculated into your final AMCAS GPA regardless of the policy at your undergrad school. Your GPA would be improved by retaking the classes, but retakes won’t “wipe out” the previous grades. Generally speaking, retaking classes is discouraged for med school applicants. You’re probably better off taking other classes in that dept and doing great on them.</p>
<p>I have been struggling deciding what career I may want to pursue after high school and I was looking for a website that may help lay out steps for pursuing a number of careers. I found this website choosingmycareer.com and found it very helpful it would probably give you ideas of other career choices to pursue!</p>
<p>Also, PA school and DO schools or med schools in the caribbean could be an option. A few years doing research would also give you an advantage.</p>