First job, need advice....

[PA-C ME]

Please help!! I'm looking for some advice from practicing PA's on taking a first job. I have three fields I am considering going into. My question is, as new graduate with little medical experience prior to PA school, what is a good first job to develop a solid understanding and background in medicine to pave the way for the rest of my career? Assuming the money and benefits are equal for all three, where is the best place to start learning? One of the jobs is in hospitalist medicine, another is clinical management of transplant patients, and the third field is managing trauma patients. Any advice anyone can offer in this dilemma would be greatly appreciated, as well as any advice about starting a first job in general. Thank you!

[deborah212]

The best of those three jobs will be the one where there is a pathway to grow as a clinician combined with your own interest in the field. All three will be broad in exposure. Are you interested in medicine (hospitalist/transplant) or surgery (transplant/trauma)? That question itself will eliminate one job.

 

Important questions to think about:

1. Are there other PAs already established that can guide you in training?

2. What are the expectations for training? ie. What will be your patient census? Are the attendings/chief residents available for help, or are you solo when there is an emergency?

3. Why are there openings? Talk to the other PAs!

4. On transplant/trauma, would you be working on the floors, OR, clinic or combination?

 

Hospitalist medicine will undoubtedly provide you with a solid medical background. Once of my classmates worked in liver transplant, and her duties were essentially that of a hospitalist except to a certain self-selected substrate of patients. If you are interested in surgery, trauma would be a great starting point.

 

There isn't a hard and fast answer. What I would recommend would be to shadow a PA or attending for a morning/afternoon in each job to see what your day-to-day activities would entail and whether you could see yourself performing them. This is quite common... I did it for my second job, and we are currently encouraging all current applicants to do this as well.

 

Good luck!

[PA-C ME]

Shadowing is great advice! I wish I had enough time to do so before the offers expire. Thank you Deborah!

[JFarnsworth]

I've had lots of different jobs in various fields and every job taught me something. So it's hard to say which one you'll learn the most in. For a long time I thought surgery was all I'd ever want to do, turns out it's not the case. I now work in FP, Derm, Occ med, and Urgent Care. All my surgical exp has helped me in these jobs, but I still have a lot to learn. Where do you want to end up? What are you interested in? What makes you think, "oh yeah, I SO want to be in that field?" knowing that you can change your mind later if you want to. You are not going to be locked into one field.