PA Updates

   Hello everyone!!! Let’s start off with standard apologies: I’m so sorry I haven’t written anything on here for the last couple of weeks! I guess I got excited about being done with chemo and I just forget that there is still a lot going on with my recovery. Tomorrow I’ll write about how I’m doing physically, but today I want to talk about what’s most on my mind at the moment…. PA school!

    Right now I’m at a really uncertain juncture in the application process. Out of the nine physician assistant programs that I applied to, I got called back to interviews at five of them, but could only go to four because of my chemo schedule (we won’t mention the evil, evil school that wouldn’t let me reschedule my interview). So I interviewed at Cornell (didn’t like it, thought I did OK) and Northeastern (absolutely LOVED it, thought I did amazing) and I got waitlisted at BOTH of them! This is pretty disheartening… On one hand getting waitlisted isn’t an outright “no”, at least they liked me enough to consider me for the program. On the other hand, it totally undermines my confidence because I have no idea of gauging the result of my interviews! I thought I was a perfect fit for Northeastern and my interviews were engaging, easy, informative… but I still haven’t gotten in yet. Sad face.

   So I have two more possibilities in the pipeline. I interviewed at George Washington University last Saturday, and I thought it went okay. The program is good, but the interviews were a bit awkward. They ask questions like “when have you been most disappointed in yourself” and “tell us about a  time that you have been under a lot of stress”. I was tempted to answer “right now” to both of those, just to see if the interviewers had a sense of humor at all (I got the impression that they really didn’t!).

   MOST IMPORTANTLY, I have an interview at Duke this Tuesday. For those of you that don’t know, Duke is my top choice school. It’s my dream. I can’t believe that I even got invited to interview there, and I am beyond excited to visit. It’s so nerve-wracking though! I haven’t had a single acceptance to any other school, so I really can’t expect things to go differently at Duke, but I have SUCH high hopes for it that I can’t help but let myself get a little carried away with how awesome it would be if I actually got in.

   Nothing is certain right now. I’m waiting to hear back from GWU, and we’ll see how things go at Duke. Within the next two or three weeks I should know if I got in anywhere at all. It would be a huge bummer for me if I didn’t manage to get accepted into any school that I applied to (I mean 0 for 9? C’mon!), but it’ll just mean I’ll have to do this whole process again next year and hope for better luck. I’m trying not to stress out about it, but this is a pretty crazy time. I just want to know what’s going to happen!!!