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Going from community college to PA school.


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Hello everyone, this is the first time I am posting on this site/forum and I hope to get a few responses from helpful individuals. 

My situation is that, I have been attending a CC and have been taking prerequisites while here because honestly I could not afford university and did not want to take out loans before getting into a profession school. Either way, I have been doing ok at the community college with cGPA of 3.3 and sGPA of 3.6. I have been working as a pharmacy tech for awhile but I may switch to more hands on with patient type of job. Now, my question is: what is the likelihood of me getting into PA school directly from community college? I have not taken the GRE yet but I will be doing that soon. I am in no rush to applying soon but I just want to clear my situation and get some input on that beforehand (Fall of 2019 is my goal). Thanks in advance for your responses. 

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  • 6 months later...

I would think your chances of doing that are probably nil. 

A good course of action is to check the schools you are interested in going to, look at their requirements, that should answer your question. You generally need a Bachelor's degree to apply. I don't think they give those at Community Colleges (unless things have changed since I haven't paid attention considering our new government leadership). 
Understand that doing the bare minimum for application is not in your best interests. I'm a current PA student and quite a few of my classmates have MPH degrees. Point being that the pool of applicants are getting more and more competitive. 

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  • 2 years later...
Hello everyone, this is the first time I am posting on this site/forum and I hope to get a few responses from helpful individuals. 
My situation is that, I have been attending a CC and have been taking prerequisites while here because honestly I could not afford university and did not want to take out loans before getting into a profession school. Either way, I have been doing ok at the community college with cGPA of 3.3 and sGPA of 3.6. I have been working as a pharmacy tech for awhile but I may switch to more hands on with patient type of job. Now, my question is: what is the likelihood of me getting into PA school directly from community college? I have not taken the GRE yet but I will be doing that soon. I am in no rush to applying soon but I just want to clear my situation and get some input on that beforehand (Fall of 2019 is my goal). Thanks in advance for your responses. 

Anywhere I’ve looked requires a bachelors degree upon applying. It doesn’t necessarily matter what you major in, but you need a bachelors degree along with the required coursework.


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  • 3 weeks later...

I might be biased since I took my prerequisites at a CC therefore most of my pre-health science friendships were made there, but my understanding is that it's quite common for students to complete their Bachelor's and then take remaining prereqs at community colleges. Several people I know who got into PA school last year did just that, as well as one friend who got into Pharmacy school and 2 others who got into MD programs. There might be a few select PA programs out there that are more picky about this, but I think those are the minority as of 2020.

One of my peers who got into a program and had several interviews last year took her PA prereqs split between several different CCs that offered the courses she needed. Hope this helps. 

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