Blog
PA school drinking from fire hose

PA School Didactic Year: How To Drink From The Fire Hose

This phrase is commonly iterated while describing all that is the didactic year of PA school. There is so much information that you will be inundated with from all directions that when you first start, it will seem overwhelming. Alas, you as the XYZ other PAs, will find your pace and learn how to adapt to this new environment. 

So how do you “drink from the fire hose”? Well, if you were to actually do this, you would get water everywhere with only a small percentage of the water being capable of consumption. And that is the key…not all the water is meant to be drank. Not all of the water is possible to be drank. This is the same situation for the didactic curriculum – not everything is possible to fit into your brain. Any PA will tell you that.

So, what to do? You will not memorize everything, and that is not the intent. You want to pay attention to high-yield concepts that you will get a hang of after you take your first few didactive exams. You want to pay attention to objectives, diseases and their treatments, bolded/underlined concepts, and ones your professors point out as important.

There are only so many questions they can ask on an exam, and they are (usually) not going to pick minute details to test your knowledge.  They want to make sure you know the important things. 

Some people worry that they won’t know everything for clinicals or when they are working post-grad. That is OK, and that is NORMAL. No one knows everything or absorbs everything that they are taught. Even if you did memorize everything for one exam, I can almost guarantee a lot of that will be gone by the next exam –so don’t let this stress you out. Important concepts will come up again during didactic, and plenty more during clinicals.

PA school works, and you will learn what you need to in order to be a successful practitioner. Remember, you are always more prepared than you think you are. Even as a PA-C, you will still be acquiring new knowledge every day. So when in school and faced with the fire hose, just take as many sips as you can.

 

Use code “PATIPS20” to save 20% on your subscription to myPAbox

Follow my instagram account @rebeccawestcoastpa

Check out are article “5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting PA School” for more insightful tips on navigating through PA school.

Other Blog Post

This Post Has 0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back To Top