Advice

If anyone ever has questions for me it should be known that you can e-mail me at gregoryhousepa[at]gmail[dot]com. And I think I'll post the questions and responses in order to make this blog a little more useful. I'll even try to start using the tagging feature, so that maybe one day I'll have an easy to access archive of advice. And also, questions don't have to pertain to PA school and such. I'm pretty sought after for advice because I'm coldly logical and honest.

Question:
I read in your blog that you have an EMT degree and was able to get a job as a medical assistant. Do you also have a medical assistant degree or was your EMT degree enough for you to qualify for this job? I hope to hear from you soon and goodluck on your first day of PA school. :)

The reason that I got the EMT-B was because from what I saw many, many PAs started out as EMTs. I should actually say many of the "older generation" PAs use to be EMTs. They all told me that it was a great entry field for health care and would give me good experience learning how to do an initial examination and assessment. The training did just that, but to be perfectly honest I didn't learn much in terms of medicine outside of doing a history. But learning how to do a history is critical. Before the class I had a B.S. in biomedical science, and knew much more on the science side than my classmates and maybe some of the instructor EMTs. I digress.

I also did the course because I thought it would help me get a job as an EMT. I later found out in my area there are very few paying EMT-B jobs.

I know that I would have gotten my job as a medical assistant without getting the EMT. However, I can't say that I would have gotten into PA school. They did ask me about my EMT training and why I did it. They liked my answer about how I did it because senior PAs told me to and that it gave me a valuable knowledge on taking a history.

So in short. No, the EMT-B did not help me get my Medical Assistant job. My college degree did. And no, I did not get a medical assistant degree. The EMT-B did help me get into PA school though, and so did my job.