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Should I finish college or get a Medical Assistant certificate?


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Hello :)

 

So, I am in college as a sophomore right now at a local community college and I am about to finish my associates. I am wondering if it would be wiser to just transfer to a 4 year and get a Bachelors OR get into a certificate program to become a medical assistant.

 

I am interested in becoming a medical assistant and then later on returning to school to become a PA with a specialty in Dermatology.

 

Ideally would love to be a MA at a skincare med office right now.

 

What do ya think? It is a difficult decision.

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There's no one right answer, but there are a lot of factors to consider:

* Will the last two years of undergrad be easier to pay for later, or harder?

* What are your family plans? If you have no room for a significant other in your life right now, you may be able to do a lot more than if you did.

* How are your grades?  You need good grades, so don't do more HCE alongside college if it will hurt your GPA... but you still need both.

* How certain are you about derm?  There are a lot of really cool facets in medicine, and at least half of my classmates changed their targeted specialties during school.  A paramedic went into interventional radiology.  I went from EMT to Family Med.  A cancer research MPH went into Ortho surgery.  All this to say... realize you may change your mind.

* Where are you living? Do you have lots of options, or are these the only two?

 

I expect you'll get more questions than answers from other posters, too, because you're asking about a very personal choice between two things that are both very important to success in PA school. "Which first?" is among the toughest questions to advise someone about.

 

Oh, and I'm moving this to the pre-PA section.  While it's not intuitively obvious, try to post by who you are now, not whom you want to read your post.  You'll get advice from the PAs who like helping applicants just fine there.

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