Debra Herrmann, DHSc, MPH, PA-C, joins the CapYear Cast today to share five tips for surviving the didactic year at PA school. Not only is Debra a renowned PA educator, but she also has over twenty years of PA experience, so she can easily discuss both the academic and practical side of PA training. If you're interested in picking up some solid gold tips for how to crush the didactic curriculum, tune in! The links mentioned in the recording are below. Questionnaire to find your learning style: https://vark-learn.com/ Thanks for listening & subscribe for updates! Graduates (& soon to be graduates) - Get clinical experience and a paycheck! Create your FREE profile on https://capyear.co/ to find employers looking to hire pre-health graduates and current students. Plus you can find a growing number of clinical research positions. Applying to Medical or PA school? CapYear offers application support and career advice from physicians, PAs, and nurses to launch your career and make your application for MD/PA school stand out from the crowd. Providers - CapYear saves time and money by proactively sourcing applicants for your positions from a pool of diverse, college-educated talent looking for clinical positions to launch their careers. The future PAs, nurses, and physicians of America can fill many entry-level clinical positions, support your team and help deliver a great patient experience. Visit our job board, post a job, and let our team get to work for you today! https://jobs.capyear.co/ For more information on gap year placement, medical assistant hiring, or MD/PA school application support, please email us at careteam@capyear.co https://capyear.co/ https://jobs.capyear.co/ Transcript below: John: Hi, everybody, and welcome back to the CapYear Cast. I'm your host, John Walkup, and today we have a very special guest. We are joined by Debra Herrmann. She is a PA educator extraordinaire, and has, what, 15 or so years of education, 21 plus years in the field. And today she's going to walk us through the didactic curriculum, what it is, and how to survive. It's going to be an interesting episode, and I suggest we buckle up - Debra, take it away. What is the didactic curriculum? Debra: All right. Well, thanks John. Thanks so much for inviting me to share my thoughts about how to survive the didactic year of PA school, you know, as a PA educator and someone who's gone through this. You know, I definitely have some tips that I want to share by the time we sort of wrap this up. But I'd love to start off by telling you a little bit more about it. The didactic year or the classroom phase of PA education. And so, you know, depending on the program that you decide to go to, that could be a year-long part of your curriculum, or it could be a year and a half or, or whatever it might be, but it's where you're going to, you know, learn the basic sciences that really. Form the pathophysiology of the clinical medicine that you're going to be learning. In addition to learning all the physical diagnoses, things like how to take a history, how to do a physical exam, you'll learn how to interpret lab findings, you know, diagnostics, other diagnostics studies. You'll get a chance to try out procedures. Like how to start an IV, how to do an ultrasound, guided IV. So all the things that you're going to need and draw upon when you go into your clinical phase of training, which is when you go out, and you do what we call clinical rotations in the various areas of medicine, pediatrics, emergency medicine, women's health, whatever your program calls it. And most programs, you know, as you know, are accredited by a body called ARC-PA, and they sort of specify all the standards around a curriculum that must be taught in both the didactic and clinical phase of training so that there is some standardization you know, among all the different PA programs out there to choose from. John: So this sounds like a jam-packed year, to say the least. Debra: Absolutely. And you know what, this will probably won't be new to your listeners when they hear this, but most people describe PA school as like drinking out of a fire hose and particularly in your didactic year because lots of information is being thrown at you and it's really very challenging to absorb it all and to process it all and then be able to immediately, you know, sort of apply it in the context of patient care. And you know, despite this really, challenging experience, there are 175,000 certified PAs out there. So my motto is if they can do it, so can you, you know, and so someone who's gone through it, like there were many times that I thought, wow, you know, my motivation decreased, and I just felt like, wow, I just can't learn One more thing today. I can't cram one more thing in there. But you remember the big picture and your "why" for even pursuing this and the "why" around being able to take care of patients as a physician assistant and to work with a team of other healthcare providers to provide really high-quality patient care. And all that comes back to you. The other thing that I will, say (universally, PAs will say about PA school) is that it sort of sets the benchmark for the rest of your life and career. I find myself saying in multiple circumstances, whatever challenge I'm facing, whether it's when I went back or was thinking about going back to get my doctorate or even just challenges I face as a parent, I normally can say to myself, wow, if I can survive PA school, I can certainly survive this. And that's what a lot of people will say, and, and I'm not alone in that. The other thing I would say is despite this challenge and how hard PA school actually is, if you ask PAs often, they'll say, "I wouldn't change a thing. I wouldn't have done anything differently." I actually go a little bit further, I'm sort of that crazy person that, if given the chance to do it all over again to go back to PA school, I would do it. So, I'm sort of rare. Not a lot of people would volunteer to do that. But I happen to sort of love the educational process, which probably is why I am a PA educator. John: Yeah, I think most people, if they were asked to go back and do, say, organic chemistry, again, most people would simply say no. And I think that's the general answer for most of, the harder yet very rewarding programs such as PA school. So that's a great overview of what that year is. Now I understand you're going to share with us some tips on how to survive it. So without further ado, what are the tips? How do you survive the first, didactic year of PA school? Debra: I have five, and I hope that's easy for folks to remember. And I want to give you a little detail about each one. But I'll just summarize them quickly by saying, the first tip is to really know your learning preference and then to use this knowledge to develop your study strategy in PA school. The second tip is to be aware of the forgetting curve. The third is to take a team approach. The fourth tip is to manage your time wisely, and the fifth tip is to remain resilient. We'll just take them one by one. Okay, so to know your learning preferences. It's really important to give some thought to the ways in which you take in information, the ways in which you know that you store information, retrieve it, and then also express information. And so most folks consider this your learning preference or learning style. And so the way to sort of figure that out for yourself is to think back to other structured educational programs that you've been in and how you've learned what you already know. Were you one of those folks who was a read-write person where you had to write out something in order to process it and to observe it and to learn it and to retain it and then be able to retrieve it? Or were you somebody who had to talk it out, you know, say it out loud, you're more auditory. Or are you someone who has to act it out, physically move it out because maybe you're more of a kinetic learner? What we find is that most students in PA programs have a mixture of learning preferences or styles. And so you have to draw upon that when you're deciding how you're going to study and how you're going to organize your materials to help maximize the retention and retrieval of that information. One other tool that I would say - so let's say some by some chance, you just have no idea what your learning style is. Maybe you're just really, really smart and you made it through undergrad without having a particular approach or even knowing what your learning preferences are. There's a tool out there called the VARK, and at the program where I teach at, we had this. Students take the VARK at orientation and the way you get to that, it's www.vark-learn.com. It's great. It'll give you a sense of what your learning preferences are, but it also will give you some guidance on what does this mean for the way that you should organize your materials and how to study. I think that's a really, really first important tip for surviving the didactic year. John: That's great. I mean, that was one of my questions, actually. There are many types of learning, and speaking for myself, I was very much a kinetic learner. In that classroom setting, sometimes it's very difficult to act it out and, and learn by doing, especially when it's coming from a lecture, and you're, you're learning stuff that's completely new and foreign. Debra: Yeah, absolutely. I actually have a kinetic component to my learning preference, and so what I found myself like, especially when I was taking an anatomy exam, I found myself sort of moving my joints and sort of trying to visualize inside what was going on. So there are many ways to exercise that kinetic learning preference in PA school. You just have to be careful and make sure you have the appropriate amount of space. John: Okay, now on to number two, please. Debra: The second tip is to beware of the f
