Physician Assistant Studies Blog

Admissions and Recruitment Fall 2022

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Written by LeAnne Snow MSU PA Admissions Coordinator & Academic Advisor

Four weeks of Pre-Interview Orientations followed by individual interviews were conducted throughout the month of September. The MSU PA Admissions Committee enjoyed meeting sixty-four enthusiastic candidates, who will undoubtedly make an impact in patient care.

A note of thanks to the many volunteers from both the didactic and clinical cohorts who helped assist with pre-interview orientation student Q&A panels and facility tours.

Thanks to the MSU Advisory Board members who assisted with interviewing hopeful candidates. Your dedication to the excellence of MSU PA program and the quality of the PA profession is appreciated.

After a highly selective admission process, the MSU PA program was pleased to offer acceptance to 33 highly qualified candidates. These 33 students hail from seven states including Utah, Illinois, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri. They represent a wide array of undergraduate and graduate institutions: Missouri State University, Saint Louis University, University of Missouri-Kansas City, University of Missouri-Columbia, Drury, Missouri Southern State University, Northwest Missouri State University, Greenville University, Wichita State University, Boise State University, and Brigham Young University. The Class of 2024 brings a variety of health care experience to the program, averaging 5,000 hours of paid, direct patient health care experience prior to admission. The average student age is 25 years old. These students averaged an overall GPA of 3.7 and an average GRE score of 304.

Spring 2023 Open House Information Session Dates are now available! Be sure to rsvp to reserve your seat: https://www.missouristate.edu/PAS/rsvp-for-open-house.htm.

The new admissions cycle begins May 1, 2023, and closes July 15, 2023, for individuals interested in applying for the class beginning in January 2024. If you wish to meet with a PA Program Advisor, please contact PA Academic Advisor and Admissions Coordinator, LeAnne Snow, at 417-836-4479 or LSnow@MissouriState.edu to make an appointment.

Fall 2022 Assessment-SIM update

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Written by Andrea Applegate, MS, PA-C MSU PA Director of Assessment

This fall our MCHHS Simulation Center underwent some major changes due to capital investments from MCCHS and a number of departments, including PAS. New audio and visual equipment, new SIM-focused staff, a new nursing coordinator, and new high-fidelity manikins have been a welcome addition. With new staff, the SIM center is now utilizing standardized patients, which allow our learners to apply their history and physical skills to “real” people as well as the manikins. They receive feedback on their performance form the faculty as well as the standardized patient. The SIM center is expanding to include AHA trainings for ACLS, PALS, and BLS which will allow us to keep our trainings at the university level rather than outsourcing to CoxHealth or Mercy for these certifications.  Each cohort completes around six Observed Structured Clinical Exams (OSCEs) each year, so the ability to keep these on-campus is a benefit and a cost savings for our department. All of these changes have provided enhanced skills practice and assessment for our learners, and their feedback has been very positive!  

Class of 2022-Reflection, Gratitude & A Bit of Advice

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Two Years in Review

written by Payden Shapland

Didactic year is tough, anyone will tell you that. We sit in a classroom Monday through Friday for up to 8 hours a day. We learn so much information from professors and guest lecturers, it is truly like trying to drink from a fire hydrant. Our program does an excellent job of hands-on training, we started learning how to take a history and perform the physical exam the first week of school. This is what laid the foundation for us to be the best providers for our patients. The biggest surprise of didactic year was growing so close to everyone. I speak for everyone when I say how thankful I am for each person in our class. Even though we spent the majority of our time studying, we still found the time to support and celebrate each other.

Clinical year consists of eight rotations, each six weeks long. We came back to campus every 6 weeks for testing. It was always fun to come back and hear everyone’s stories about diagnosis they had made and procedures they had done. Preceptors share their time and knowledge with students, which is the best gift any student could ask for. We were able to put in chest tubes, intubate, suture, hold a beating heart, educate patients, and learn our own style of medicine. Medicine truly is an art, and I know any PA student will tell you that. We have seen birth to death, and many things in between. Our journey in medicine has just begun, and I know the MSU PA class of 2022 will put our knowledge to good use to serve our communities well.

 

Thank You 

written by Leah Krafft, Class of 2022 Vice President

As we have wrapped up two years of vigorous work, we would like to pause and reflect on those that got us here. We would like to thank LeAnne Snow for guidance before we even stepped foot in O’Reilly 101-you are a big part of all of our stories! We would like to thank our professors: Kimberly Cook, Nathan Miracle, Andrea Applegate, Shannon Hauschildt, and Katelyn Maben. Thank you for leading our cohort to success in the didactic year, clinical year, and beyond! You have been patient with us in this learning process and our encouragers! Thank you to our program director, Dr. Canales, for being available to share your guidance to each of us amongst your responsibilities. Sincere thank-you’s to our administrative staff, Donna, Ben, and Kathy, for answering the many emails and paperwork that got us into our rotations. As for clinical rotations, a big thank-you to all of our preceptors for sacrificing your time and sharing with us your wisdom, correction, and expertise. Without each of you, we would not be where we stand today— taking our PANCE exams to add that C to PA-C! We hope to humbly step forward with our experience and pour into the future cohorts of physician assistant students.

 

Advice for Future Classes 

written by Sarah Phillips, Class of 2022 President

Class of 2023,

I am so excited for each of you as you begin using all that you have been studying rigorously for the past year of your lives. Clinical year was a special one. My advice to each of you would be to take every single opportunity you are given and never allow clinicals to become mundane. Walk into clinicals every single day eager to learn. This year is full of opportunities if you are open to accepting them. No matter how incapable you feel, say yes. Say yes to every procedure, seek out opportunities, and never forget that you are capable of much more than you know.

Have grace with yourself as you learn this year. You will make mistakes and there will be questions you do not know. Sometimes you will work long hours and feel like throwing the towel in. But I promise this is going to be the most exciting year of your life if you look at it from the right perspective. Every day you put your white coat on, remember how much responsibility it holds and be excited to learn. Never forget how fortunate you are to be in this position. You fought so hard to be here, and I am so excited to continue following along each of your journeys.

 

Class of 2024,

Don’t blink! The next two years are going to be the most challenging of your life, but if you let them, they will also be the best. No one can ever prepare you for what you are about to do, but I promise it is going to be so worth it. The first piece of advice I would give is to remember that your identity is so much more than ‘physician assistant student’. Don’t forget to make time for your family, friends, and the things that make you, you. The next two years will push you to your limits at times, but you are going to make the best memories. Document it all and take a million pictures! Allow those around you to support you when you need it, it is all going to be okay.

Looking back, physician assistant school was the best two years of my life. I am overwhelmed thinking about the lifelong friendships you will build, the memories you will make, and the things each of you will experience practicing medicine. I know you are all nervous right now, and that’s okay. But just know there are so many people cheering for you. The next two years are going to fly by, make the most of it. You’ve got this. Welcome to the Missouri State family!

Fall 2022 Clinical Education Review

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Written by Kim Cook, MS, PA-C Director of Clinical Education

Fall semester of 2022 ended very successfully. Students completed rotations in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Oregon during their last months in the Program. They came back at the end of each rotation with great stories of all they had learned and gotten to do at their clinical sites. Students have wonderful things to say about our clinical partners who spend so much time teaching, above and beyond their many other responsibilities. We also continue to get excellent feedback on our students, both on written evaluations at the end of rotations, as well as in-person feedback during site assessments. Preceptors routinely comment that our students are their favorite students to have. We are very proud of the effort they put into learning about the art of taking care of patients, as well as the contributions they make as part of healthcare teams in many different communities.  

The Program continues to evolve, with more and more supplemental activities and methods to enhance clinical learning. Students take part in more OSCEs (Objective Structured Clinical Examinations), have more experiences learning in a hands-on fashion via standardized patients and simulated patients, have more interdisciplinary interactions, and have more opportunities to utilize the latest in medical technology and assessment (i.e., POCUS-point of care ultrasound) than ever before.  

More students had formal job offers or at least good prospects of jobs after graduation than they have in the past several years. The disciplines that have been most popular for this cohort to accept jobs in after graduation are Family Medicine and Urgent Care/ER, with a couple taking jobs in less common specialties such as Gastroenterology and critical care.  

We can’t wait to see the Class of 2022 thrive in their new careers.  

Class of 2022 links:

Fall 2022 Didactic Education Review

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Written by Shannon Hauschildt, MS, PA-C MSU PA Associate Program Director

The didactic fall semester is a full 17 credit hours and keeps the students very busy. The Clinical Problem-Solving Seminar course hones the students’ medical decision-making skills as small groups explored patient cases. At the end of that course, the students had the opportunity to practice clinical examination skills at the MU Simulation Center with standardized patients.  Laboratory and Procedures is an active course where the students enjoy learning technical and clinical skills such as suturing, intubation, central line placement, casting/splinting, and a FAST exam with point-of-care ultrasound.  Pharmacology and Clinical Medicine extended through the fall semester and challenged the students to expand their knowledge from the summer.  The fall semester culminated in the PAEA PACKRAT (Physician Assistant Clinical Knowledge Rating and Assessment Tool) exam. This is an objective, comprehensive exam for student and curricular evaluation to help guide our learners as they prepare for the second phase of the program.  Lastly, on December 10th, thirty-one students from the Class of 2023 were donned with white coats and celebrated their first-year accomplishments.  We are excited to see what 2023 brings to this great group of PA students!

Jenna Glodowski, Class of 2023

A shout out to Jenna Glodowski (Class of 2023) who was one of 18 students from across the country selected to attend University of Alabama at Birmingham PA Program first annual Advanced Surgical PA Training Program. This program was a weeklong training session for both first- and second-year PA students. Jenna commented, “I had such a great experience and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in surgery and/or invasive procedures.  We got to be in an operating room setting three times and took turns playing the role of first assist, scrub tech, and operating the cameras in lap ports. We got to put in wound vacs and had lots of practice suturing which is very different on real tissue compared to what I had been practicing on.” We are very proud of Jenna’s accomplishment as a representative of herself, the MSU PA program and the PA profession.

Class of 2023 links: