How hard is PA school?

PAs must be able to diagnose and develop treatment plans for patients, so in preparation for that, PA school can be just as rigorous as medical school and sometimes even harder to get accepted into.

There are many factors that make PA school very hard; in a broad context, these include the volume of information that must be learned, studied, and memorized, challenging exams and the requirement of clinical experience.

The initial year of PA school can be the most difficult, as this normally has courses that rely on thick textbooks with lots of complex medical information. Typically first-year PA students spend the majority of their time studying these materials and attempting to master medical concepts.

Here are some of the courses that are given in the first year of PA school:

• Clinical anatomy

• Clinical medicine

• Critical care

• Emergency medicine

• Epidemiology

• Integrative medicine

• Obstetrics or Gynecology

• Pediatrics

• Pharmacology

• Physiology

• Preventive medicine

• Primary care

• Surgery

• Technical medical skills

The sheer volume of information a PA student must consume is one of the most difficult factors in PA school. And this is information that can not just be memorized and then forgotten.

It is critical that PA students retain as much as much information as possible because their professional careers may see them calling on a myriad of medical information in order to perform their job adequately.

The pressure in PA is another difficult element. Students are expected to maintain good grades and rank above a certain threshold. Students that score below this will be placed in remediation or be dismissed from the program.

The clinical phase of PA school is another hard period as it sees the students apply what they've learned in hands-on, real-world medical settings.

This entails long and arduous hours of on-the-job training, sometimes in stressful medical environments. And simultaneously, PA students must also be studying for and taking exams in their class schedule.