The Physician Assistant Life - Everything Physician Assistant. A Podcast for Practicing PAs, Pre-Physician Assistants and PA Students.

How to Get Into PA School With a Low GPA PA school administrators from ten top-ranking PA programs answer your questions on how to get into PA school with a low GPA. A low GPA is probably the hardest area to improve. This makes sense – it was years in the making, and can’t be undone without time. It can take about a year in advanced level science courses to bump a high 2.x GPA over 3.0. The lower your GPA, and the more classes you’ve taken, the longer it will take to reflect improvements in your academic record. What is your CASPA calculated GPA? Before you do anything it is important that you have this number in hand. You can view your CASPA GPAs once your application has been Verified. You can read about that here on the CASPA website. When I applied to PA school I had a cumulative GPA of 2.9, a result, probably like many of you reading this, of some early misdirection. I got my act together in the second half of my undergraduate career, finishing on the Dean's list with a 3.8 GPA. But my overall GPA did not fully recover and was lower than the 3.0 minimum of the school where I was accepted. Indeed this is not the norm, but you should not let a lower than average GPA stop you from finding a path to PA school if this is truly your passion. Fortunately, you are not alone. Every year PA programs from across the country come together to answer questions posed by aspiring Pre-PA students like yourself. Not surprisingly, questions regarding PA school admissions and low (or lower than average) GPA topped the list. Below are the answers to these questions. Here is an additional table that was provided on the PA forums. Included in this are PA programs that consider the trend of last 30, 45, or 60 credit hours for admissions. School CGPA SGPA PREREQGPA HCE Rosalind Franklin 2.75 (Last 60 CH) 2.75 C or better 800 Hrs South College 2.75 2.75 prereq sci 2.75 N/A Arcadia Uni 3.0 Recommended N/A N/A 200 Hrs Charles R Drew 3.0 Preferred 3.0 Preferred 3.0 Preferred 2,000 Hrs James Madison 3.0 Preferred N/A N/A 1,000 Hrs Keiser Uni 2.75 3.0 3.0 100 Hrs MGH N/A 3.0 preferred B- or better 1,000 Hrs Stephens College 2.75 3.0 3.0 500 Hrs

So many PAs I meet are unsatisfied with their careers. I have met many a PA or NP who has become entangled in a web of profit-driven, incentivized-by-the-numbers healthcare. They have forgotten why they became a physician associate (PA) to begin with. We all become PAs with a great desire to help people, but it often doesn't end that way. PA Jekyll and Mr. Hide The transformation happens sometime around graduation... Once the salary figures start being tossed around. It's amazing how our priorities can shift so rapidly. We tend to focus on competition, numbers, earnings, and benefits, sometimes neglecting the true worth of our abilities in helping those who rely on us. We succumb to social pressures, and after a while, when money and profit run dry, we are left unsatisfied. This level of dissatisfaction is measured by the degree to which you have succumbed to another pressure in life: Social Pressures to Conform This counterforce can be very powerful, and you want to fit into a group. Unconsciously you feel that what makes you different is embarrassing or painful. Your parents often act as a counterforce as well.  They may seek to direct you to a career path that is lucrative and comfortable. If these counterforces become strong enough, you can lose complete contact with your uniqueness, the reason you went into medicine, and who you really are. Your inclinations and desires become modeled on those of others.  This can set you off on a very dangerous path, and you end up choosing a career path that does not really suit you, your desire and interest slowly wane and your work suffers for it. You come to see pleasure and fulfillment as something that comes from outside of work. Because you are increasingly less engaged in your career, you fail to pay attention to changes going on in the field, and you fall behind the times and pay a price for this. At moments when you must make important decisions, you flounder or follow what others are doing because you have no sense of your inner radar or direction to guide you. You have broken contact with your destiny, the one you aspired to when you started PA school. At all costs, you must avoid such a fate!  The process of following your life task all the way to mastery can begin at any point in life. The hidden force that drove you into a career in medicine, into this career as a physician assistant, is always in you and ready to be engaged. Three Steps to Realign With Your Goals as a Physician Assistant First: Connect or reconnect with your inclinations. The first step is inward, search the past for your inner voice, clear away the voices that confuse you such as parents or peers, and look for an underlying pattern, a chord to your character that you must understand as deeply as possible. Second: With this connection established, you must look at the career path you are already on or about to begin. The choice of this path or redirection of it is critical. To help in this stage, you will need to enlarge your concept of work itself. Too often,