Are PAs Nontraditional Medical Students?
The author of a Perspectives piece in The New England Journal of Medicine, “From All Walks of Life—Nontraditional Medical Students and the Future of Medicine,” writes that at his medical school, a PA was considered a nontraditional medical student. Sandeep Jauhar, MD, PhD, entered medical school with a background in condensed-matter physics.
When I entered medical school at 26, I was considered to be a nontraditional student — but I was hardly alone. A middle-aged woman in my class had an advanced degree in cell biology. One classmate in his early 30s had been a physician assistant for 10 years; there were also a lawyer and an AmeriCorps organizer among us. We were the new face of medicine, or so we were told, and there was considerable interest in us from professors and administrators, if not from our classmates.
The mean age of first-year medical students today is about 24, though 10% are 27 or older. Medical schools now routinely admit students in their 30s or 40s who already have families or are well into another career before turning toward medicine. In general, these students have been welcomed into the profession. They bring maturity, diversity, broader perspectives, "life experience." But what do these physicists, musicians, actors, lawyers, writers, stockbrokers, and dancers add to the profession? Since primary care physicians are in short supply, doesn't medicine just need more conventional, nose-to-the-grindstone clinicians?
What do you think? Are PAs really that nontraditional of a medical student? Doesn’t “more conventional, nose-to-the-grindstone clinicians” sound like one way to describe PAs?
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