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25. Clinical year tools
165 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, I talk about what tools you really need to learn and do well in clinical year.
For more information on Locumstory, go to https://zen.ai/thepaexperience.
Check out the podcast on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thepaexperience
If you are interested in being interviewed about your school email me at thepaschoolexperience@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction to the PA Experience Podcast
00:00:15
Speaker
Welcome to the PA Experience Podcast. I'm your host, Sebring Sands, and as a PA, I take you behind the scenes to see what it takes to become a PA in all steps of the journey.
Interviews with PA School Graduates
00:00:32
Speaker
Before I get started, I want to mention that I am looking for people to interview talking about their PE school experience. I want to interview someone from every one of the programs who graduated from there.
00:00:47
Speaker
Hopefully within the last five years, I think this could be a really awesome resource for prospective PE school students and really add something to the PE school pipeline community. So please, if you're interested, please reach out to me with the email that I have linked in the description to set up an interview to talk about.
00:01:07
Speaker
Pros, cons of your preschool experience, a little bit about your story, but mostly talking about the program. I'm not looking for people to really hate on it. Professional take from somebody who graduated from there. So that is something I am trying to work on. So please, if you have any interest, email me and I'll get back to you. Thank you.
Benefits of Locum Tenens
00:01:28
Speaker
Are you a provider, whether it be a PA, physician, or NP, looking for a change? Consider locum tenens. Whether you're burnt out, need a change, a pace, or looking to supplement your income, locum tenens might be the solution for you. You might ask, what is locum tenens? The story of locum
00:01:47
Speaker
began in 1979 as a way to provide physician coverage for facilities supporting underserved populations. Locum's has remained true to its roots and has become a way of life for physicians, NPs, and PAs who work with Locum's for diverse reasons, finding the perfect work-life balance, a way to make extra money, explore the country and the world, learn new skills, and have more autonomy.
00:02:08
Speaker
and as a transition into retirement, and even to rediscover a new level of medicine. There are many different specialties offered ranging from primary care to shift work, specialties like emergency medicine, hospitalist medicine, psychiatry, OBGYN, and surgeons. Pay is often $32 more an hour than the average permit positions for physicians, and $17 more an hour than the average permit positions for PAs and NPs.
00:02:36
Speaker
If you're interested, please visit LocumStory.com today to learn more about Locum Tenants and see if it's right for you. Also, when you're ready to pull the trigger, please use my link in the description to start the process.
Essential Tools for Clinical Year
00:02:49
Speaker
Welcome everyone to another episode of the podcast. Today, I kind of wanted to step back and talk about something I think is important and very, very relevant to at least people in their clinical year of PA school. I really wanted to talk about some of the tools that are important to think about and to use in clinical year and also some caution, the things that I've experienced that kind of want to warn people about a little bit.
00:03:19
Speaker
Okay, let's get started. All you really need in clinical year is that is one question pink. Usually, hopefully your program would pay for a question. Like ours did, they pay for ROSH. It was very useful, very valuable. It helped me pass all of my end of rotation exams.
Study Resource Recommendations
00:03:39
Speaker
You only really need one. I know somewhat sometimes I was like this, I felt like I needed every resource.
00:03:46
Speaker
either UWorld or other question bakes, but you don't really need to. One is sufficient enough. I do have to tell you this, end of rotation exams are hard. I feel like they're harder than the pants was. Maybe because it's the lack of time to study or the very minutia, you have to dive in deeply in order to kind of understand and answer the questions correctly. The pants is a lot more broad and I feel like easier in that way. But one question bank is plenty.
00:04:15
Speaker
There's also some free resources. I would use those as much as possible. If you have a hard time understanding concepts, there's YouTube videos, there's Nerd Ninja and things like that. Those resources are very helpful. Also, you can get free hippo end of rotation exam questions if you just log in with your AAPA student membership. I'll put that in the link in the description. It's very helpful.
00:04:40
Speaker
Smarty pants? Okay, smarty pants is cheap. It's relatively cheap. The question bakes, okay, I shared it with somebody during school. And it was helpful for me to help solidify some of the concepts and disease states and things like that. But it wasn't good enough for end of rotation exam prep, in my opinion, too simplistic, a little bit too straightforward.
00:05:05
Speaker
um russia is much better in those instances but they do have some good high yield review sheets of everything and they kind of outline the blueprints very well which is very helpful so if that's something for you you can think about it it's relatively cheap it's like 80 something dollar less than a hundred dollars a year
00:05:25
Speaker
Which is relatively cheap. Most of these programs that we can get are in the hundreds. Two to three hundred a year. That can add up quite a bit. So that's something to think about. Review books. I'm under the impression that you only need one review book. You only need Pants Prep Pearls version 4.
Effective Use of Flashcards
00:05:42
Speaker
there's other ones out there like first line or something like that not as good as pants prep updated version and it's super cheap fifty dollars get straight from the creator dwayne you know i'm a little biased too i the program paid for his program very useful i mean i could debate whether i would pay for it or not but it's free for me it's very helpful in that regard i really need one review book
00:06:10
Speaker
You don't need to buy a multiple. I ended up buying one. I did get the version three when I first started PA school and bought the first line. Didn't really use it at all. And I got a couple from the program. So I ended up with four at the end of PA school. You don't really need to do that to yourself, in my opinion.
00:06:30
Speaker
And also another thing that's very helpful and will be your friend is the blueprint for that end of rotation. Some programs have specialized end of rotation exams. There might not be the PAEA ones, but for those that you do have a PAEA end of rotation exam, you use the blueprints will tell you
00:06:52
Speaker
which questions to help the percentages of each type of question, things to focus on. For my family medicine rotation there's a lot of topics to cover and I end up not covering really a lot of like neurology and things like that because there are only a couple questions and I'm doing that was my best in a rotation score when I ignored a lot of those little ones and I just focused on the big ones.
00:07:16
Speaker
Same thing for surgery. I passed it well enough, but I only focused on the main big ones because I didn't have a lot of time to focus on the little minutiae, the questions that I only had a couple, the topics that I only had a couple questions in there. So that's something to think about as well.
00:07:36
Speaker
really gauge what how to prepare with the blueprint and tell you what the topics about and I you know a lot of times you go over the topics that you don't really know very well the things you do remember really well you probably not spend as much time on those but focus on the stuff you don't know very well it's very very helpful
00:07:56
Speaker
You also, I would recommend having a good flashcard program. My program, a lot of people used Quizlet, which I have to tell you, it is superior in sharing, but Enki, I think, is still king. It has way more tools, and I feel like it's better. It's definitely a better algorithm and things like that than Quizlet. And you can put it on your phone. You don't have to pay for it. It's completely free, unless you get the iOS app, which
00:08:25
Speaker
You know, it's debatable, it's probably helpful, but on the computer is super, super good. So I would definitely think about investing in some time and learning that. And I think I got in this trap of trying to memorize everything because I felt like that's how I learned the best. Really only focus on the non-concept facts, you know, maybe
00:08:46
Speaker
You know, this drug is pathognomonic with this side effect or this address for effect, stuff like that. Things that are concrete facts that you might need to know for a specific disease or things like that.
00:09:03
Speaker
Path of Monarchs stuff is very helpful because you do see it in the pants and the end of rotation. It's sometimes just a little obscured and hidden within the technical term for things, descriptions, but that's what I would focus on. High old things that are concrete in knowledge and in memorizing and maybe certain buzzwords that are you can't get away from. So there's certain buzzwords that have to go with.
00:09:32
Speaker
pathology.
Avoiding Unnecessary Expenses
00:09:34
Speaker
So I would memorize those with the flashcard app. That's what I would recommend. I'll tell you a story. After I failed my rotation, after my third rotation of PA school, I was pretty down. I didn't know how to continue really. I was very demoralized and didn't have any confidence and I fell into the trap
00:09:57
Speaker
of seeking for a tool to save my PA school experience. And there's this one person, I won't name any names, but very influential in the PA school education podcast realm, very good at marketing. I felt like he marketed as this will save you, this will make you, if you buy this thing, this program,
00:10:23
Speaker
this newsletter, you will be able to pass your pans, pass pay school, do really well in getting your jobs and things like that. And it was $29 a month. And I felt like I needed this. And the problem with it is month after month, he kept stringing me along. And the offering up the next one will be where I dump amazingly good, juicy information.
00:10:52
Speaker
But all of it, I almost paid for a whole year worth of these monthly newsletters. None of that was new. I've heard it all before, just repackaged in a, you know, this is what you should know, you should do. Some things I used, but $29 a month is the most expensive anything you'll ever get in the PA school realm. It's way too expensive.
00:11:15
Speaker
And I had a hard time justifying it, and he used the marketing ploy of, if it's something that changed I can use for the rest of my life, I might end up paying more money than that. Like, this is not very much, that's the way it made it seem like. That wasn't very much money. It was way too much money for what I got, and I didn't even end up using the last newsletter for pants prep that I, and I ended up passing just fine.
00:11:40
Speaker
So don't give into your anxiety and marketing and think you need everything because you do not. I promise you, you do not need everything under the sun. It might be helpful, but is it $29 a month helpful or is it $300 a year helpful? A lot of these tools I end up never using, hardly using and spending so much money on.
00:12:02
Speaker
So trying to help people not fall into that trap. You don't need anything, everything.
Podcast Updates and Feedback
00:12:07
Speaker
You just need a couple really good tools that you like and stick with that. Trying to reinvent the wheel so many times isn't going to be productive, especially in your clinical year. So focus on those things that you're comfortable with, that work well for you because they all work well. They all will help you pass the EOR exams.
00:12:25
Speaker
You don't have to be amazing unless you're really typing, you really have to get the top score in the program. You just need to pass what your program says is your pass rate, and you just need to pass the pants. No one else cares about whatever you do. Okay, I've said my piece. I have some great interviews lined up, so I hope you have been enjoying
00:12:46
Speaker
all the podcasts so far. I've been trying to update some of my earlier ones, this kind of being one of them to be more relevant because those were done so long ago and I'm a different stage of life now and into my career. And also, please leave a reading and review for the podcast. This really helps it be found by other PE students. You know, it's hard to really market in this thing. So reading and reviewing people searching for this on podcast platforms is very, very helpful. So that would be great.
00:13:16
Speaker
Also, check out the YouTube channel. I recently decided to upload all my videos that I've been doing for interviews on the channel. So that's something you can kind of see. It's kind of nice to see who's behind the microphone and who's interviewing. So that's kind of a fun little thing I added to as well. So I'll talk to you next time. See you later.