The Waiting Game
Let me start off by saying, I LOVE getting messages from you all. A good portion of the message I get are from first time applicants and reapplicants and one of their main concerns is, “What do I do after I submit my application”.
I have been there. You’ve worked really hard, you’ve been taking classes, done the volunteering, done the patient care experience, worked on your applications, done your personal statement, put in all this time and effort and money to you get to the point of applying to PA School.
You hustle really hard to get your applications submitted by the deadline that you’ve chosen or the schools’ deadlines and then after you push submit, you just sit there and you don't know what to do. Then you get really anxious and check your email 500 times a day because you're just waiting on those interview invites. Then you get an email from a school and you get really excited and you open it and it's just a confirmation telling you they got your application, with no information.
Talk about discouraging. Then you wait some more and you may get another email… that’s a rejection and that stinks and hurts and makes you feel like all this effort was for nothing. BUT then maybe that same day you get an interview invite. I just want you to realize that this process is so random, and I understand that it is so, so stressful and not really much fun. The day you get an interview is fun but the right after that your nerves kick in and you have a whole, whole other thing to worry about.
Today I just wanted to talk about that a little bit and go through some things that you can be doing while you're in that waiting period so at least you can calm yourself down but also feel like you're being proactive in that time period.
PA school has become very competitive and because of that, my advice to anyone whether it's your first time applying, whether you're reapplying, is to go into the cycle with the mindset of you're going to have to reapply. Even if your application is stellar, you can't think of anything else you need to do better, and you feel very confident still find ways to improve.
Think about having to reapply because here is an example of what your DON’T want to have happen:
Let's say you applied in May and then you kind of were like, “Okay I've applied I'm still waiting to hear back” and you decide to go, I don't know travel the world for a year. The next April you haven't heard anything from any schools you’ve gotten a couple rejection but you still want to go to PA school. When you go to reapply, your application will be the same and I'm and you can't expect any different or better result if you haven't improved your application.
At that point you need to have improved. You need to have things so you can say: ”Over this past year, this is what I've been doing differently” and then when those schools get your application for the second time, they need to be able to compare them and go, “You know this person really wants this and they've been working hard this past year to reach their goals.”
That's a mistake that some people make and just to clarify, when it comes to reapplying, a school only knows that you're a reapplicant if you have applied there previously. If you’ve submitted your application to a school and then you submit again the next year, they will know you're a reapplicant. If you submitted to school A and the next year you submit to school B, school B will not know that you’ve applied before unless you tell them. If you allude to it your personal statement or tell them at an interview, then they may be able to understand that. That’s one thing to take taking into consideration.
One thing I’d recommend, is try to be patient. It's not fun and like I said, I totally get the anxiety and stress that comes with it. Once you’ve turned everything in, there’s really not that much that you can do. You can’t change your application, so you can't go back in and edit things. Let’s say you go back in and you're pouring over your application and you realize there's a typo, you can't change it. At that point, you might as well just let it go. Don't go back into your application and double, triple check it after you’ve submitted. Because you're not going to be able to change any mistakes.
Now if you notice, let’s say you made a huge mistake. Let’s say you accidentally entered your hours completely wrong. At that point you still can't fix it through CASPA but you may need to contact the school's individually to give them an update on that and whether they take that into account or not is up to them, because some schools will only really consider what is on your application.
Each school has a different process and a different timeline and so if you’ve heard from one and haven’t from another, that doesn't necessarily mean anything, they just do things differently.
One thing I like to tell people to do and this is what I did, is to check the PA forums. So physicianassistantforum.com is a great community where people are always chatting and each school has a different thread and you can see for that application cycle and you can look at it and see if people are getting interviews or rejections and that can help you a little bit.
I want to say something about that because I do not want you to obsess over it and it can be easy do that when you get on the you just start checking them and you go, “Oh my gosh, Susie got an interview and I haven't heard back and her stats are so good and mine are so terrible.” Try not to compare yourself it is a small subset of people who are on the forum and it is not everyone whose applying, it is not everyone who is going to be accepted so don't let them be discouraging to you but just use them as a timeline check.
Let’s say that you applied a month ago and everyone’s gotten confirmations and you’ve heard nothing, you’ve haven’t even gotten a confirmation that they have your application. At that point, it may be worth reaching out and saying, “Hey, I’ve applied, I’ve submitted my fees, I’ve submitted my application, have y’all looked at it or received it?” That can help you if you want to make sure you are on the same page as everyone else, so something to keep in mind there. You know with working towards reapplying even though that's not what any of us want to do. You want to look at your application very critically and that's what we do in our pre-pa assessment and try to figure out what you can do better and what you can improve on, to make yourself stand out and show that you've improved for next cycle, when you potentially have to apply again.
Look at every part of your application, look at your coursework, do you have B’s or better in all of your prerequisite courses? How are your GPAs, is it competitive or do you need to keep working towards classes...? How many patient care hours do you have? What kind of variety do you have? What's the quality of your patient care experience? What about volunteering? Have you done some volunteering in your community to show your commitment to your area and your commitment to the underserved? Doesn't even necessarily have to be something medical, but you need to show that you have a passion for helping people. You can't go to an interview and say, “Yeah, I want to help people” if you've never done it. So you need to be showing that. Have you gotten shadowing hours in multiple areas, to show that you really understand the PA profession and know what you're getting yourself into? All these things are important.
Do you have strong letters of recommendations? Is your personal statement really good…? It should be because that's what's going to get you the interview, once you've checked all the boxes. These are all things that you want to look at and think about while you're in the process of making sure your application is ready for PA school. If you do have to reapply and again, we hope you don’t, but if you do, you want for that improvement.
Find some distractions and relax. If you do get into PA school, once you start it is full steam ahead so you really want to take that time even though you're probably working and working toward getting improvements on your application but spend time with your family and your friends enjoy yourself. You may have to move for PA school, who knows, but try to distract yourself.
Start working out, pick up a skill cooking, whatever but pick a skill so that you are not constantly stressing out and thinking about it. I know, easier said than done but do your best.
You can update programs periodically and so, I talked about earlier checking in with programs if you feel like you maybe should have heard something. Which is fine but also let's say that you do something, let’s say you going on a medical mission trip or you have gained a substantial more amount of hours or you do some more shadowing, you finish a course you get a good grade, you update a prerequisite, whatever. At that point you can update the programs. Now you can update these things in CASPA, and they will send out an update to the programs but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the programs look at it. What I would recommend is no more than once a month, send in an email to whoever is the head of admissions or the General Admissions email and just say, “Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I've gotten four hundred more hours, will you please update my file, thank you.” Short and sweet, not begging for anything but that does a couple things. It shows them you're still working towards this goal. It also shows them you’re still available and still interested. It's kind of a way to let that school know that you would like to hear back from them and you really are interested in their program. Don’t do it too much, don't bother them, don’t become an annoyance but you can periodically give them some updates.
Now another thing is go ahead and start preparing for interviews. If you submitted your application, you have no idea when that interview invite may come in and this can be very frustrating because you may get very little notice. I’ve gotten emails from people who have been asked to come to an interview, the next day if they were near a local program. I mean for me, I think I had for one interview about a month's notice and for one about 1-2 weeks but it is not uncommon for there to be a very short period of time for you to prepare and so you want to go ahead and start working on that. With preparing for interviews, I’ve done a lot of podcast interview episodes about interview. You can definitely check out the PA school interview guide (and now course!), that's the book I wrote about interviewing. There's over 300 questions in there and so that's one way to prepare talking to PAs, family members, friends, kind of getting them to quiz you. Doing some mock interviews, really just going ahead and practicing so that when that interview comes, even though you'll be nervous you may not be quite as nervous as you would have been if you are scrambling last minute to try to prepare.
Those are a few things you can do and again I just want you to know that waiting is the hardest and so after you wait, after submitting your application for the interview, then you have a whole other waiting process of waiting to hear back from your interview. Gosh that may even be worse, I’m not sure, but in that period at that point, there’s not anything you can do and so you may get the call that you're accepted, which is awesome. You may get put on a waitlist, which is better than nothing and uhm, at this point even to get an interview or put on waitlist is a huge deal and people come off waitlist all the time. Then you may get a rejection and if you do, if you're rejected from a school, either right before you get an interview or after, reach out to that program. See what they suggest you improve on, see what part of your application they didn't feel was adequate or didn't fit with their programs so that you can improve yourself, if possible.
Those are my tips for today! Let me know in the comments if there are any other questions I can answer for you!
