Will this hurt my chances?

[royalcuckoo]

Hi all!

I will be one of the applicants without a bachelor’s degree this year. If I enroll in a bachelor’s program at Pacific, will it hurt my chance of acceptance to their PA program? It would mean that I would have to drop the bachelor’s program because it runs through summer semester. A friend brought this up as a possible concern thinking that the PA program wouldn’t want to harm the numbers of another program at the same school, but I hadn’t thought of it before and now I’m a bit worried. However, I don’t want to cross my fingers and hope to get in, and then not get in, and then not have been working on my bachelor’s degree so that I can apply to several schools next year. 

Any thoughts or feedback greatly appreciated!

 

[hmtpnw]

I actually just went to the PA open house last night and they touched on this a bit.

We were told that about 1% of applicants fall into this category and that every year 1 - 3 students without bachelors degrees are accepted into the program. It sounded as if it wouldn’t make you any less competitive to not have one.

I really doubt that enrolling in their bachelors program would make a difference either way. You may get questions about it in the interview but I doubt that it comes up. Lots of people drop programs for PA school and I’m sure pacific understands that. If you’re that concerned about it then go to PSU, it’s a quarter of the cost because it’s not private and they have a lot of great programs.

One other thing I’ll mention that I was surprised by is how seriously they stress GPA since most programs prioritize PCE. Although their minimum is a 3.0, it was suggested not to apply without a 3.4 as you would likely just get screened out. Of 2200 applications only about 700 meet their soft GPA requirements and the rest they screen out. The first thing pacific considers is GPA and it’s weighted very heavily. Not sure how this applies to your situation, but I figured I would throw it out there. This program feels like the opposite of the MEDEX bachelors program, which seems to consider PCE much more of a priority.