The Home Stretch

As this semester winds to an end, we wish everyone the best. Thanks to everyone that has participated last week in the suturing workshop. Dr. Chung gave a great presentation and had some great tips on how to improve our technique.

Yesterday, Dr. Trask gave us some tips on writing our personal statements for our applications. She told us to start early and to make a list of all our activities and achievements. Decided what attributes or topics that you wish to display to medical schools. This is very important because readers must want to continue reading and be interesting enough that they will want to interview you.

Good luck with finals and have a happy holidays!

PA, ENT, and pigs feet

AMSA at Weber State University has had some great meetings lately.

We had a physician's assistant from McKay-Dee Hospital come and speak to us about the how physicians and PAs work together. Also, she explained about who PAs were, their pros and cons, and compared them with other healthcare workers like nurse practitioners.

Some highlights from her message included that PAs in her office had great autonomy and while this varies from clinic to clinic it really depends on the doctor they work under and state laws. Some of the pros of being a PA include the ability to move around between specialties without needing extensive training (i.g. residencies). She also mentioned that she gets to focus more on the patients that she sees and doesn't have to worry about running the clinic or paying malpractice. However, she said that if she was in our shoes, as students, she would recommend us go all the way to medical school.

Also, Dr. Schuller an ENT doctor from the community spoke to us about getting in to medical school and the life of a ENT doctor. Dr. Schuller spent three years on the admissions board at Dartmouth where he went to medical school. He told us that all of us are unique and that we need to show that to medical schools, because when they go through a hundreds of applications they need something to remember us by. He also told us that coming from a small school like Weber State we are at a disadvantage and that we should rock to MCAT to displace any grade inflation due to WSU's small size.

Coming up next week we have the opportunity to learn some suturing techniques! Reps donated suturing equipment and the club is buying pigs feet from the market so that Professor Chung, M.D. can teach us some suturing techniques. It should be sweet, if you haven't signed up email us and we will see what we can do. Don't miss it this Wednesday 11-24!