Classes and Impressions on the First Week of School

Now that the first week of school has come and gone I have a general idea of how the semester is going to shape up. So far things are looking good.

The first thing that strikes me as different from my time in undergrad is the amount of reading material. As expected, in graduate school you can expect to go over much more material in a much shorter time frame than in undergrad. This first week, we've been assigned around 300 pages worth of textbook material from all of our classes. It's definitely manageable and I expect the workload to stay at this pace from here on out. Reading this much material every week doesn't mean that you'll be able absorb all of the information from one sitting, but it's a good prelude before going to lectures and studying.

Another difference is that there are no more "fluff" courses, that is, courses that are unrelated to your field of study. I don't mean to speak of classes like philosophy, history or underwater basket weaving in a pejorative light, but the classes that you'll be taking as a PA graduate student are the hard science courses you'll need for passing the ASCP certification exam and for when you go into the working world.

Because most of the courses you'll be taking are related to the human body and disease, there will be quite a significant amount of overlap in the learning material you'll have between courses. Some of the material you learn in one class might even show up on a test in another class. As you're studying, it's also easier to switch modes between anatomy and pathology than it is to switch between anatomy and literature.

Without further ado, here are the courses for the Pathologists' Assistant Program at WVU for the spring semester of 2011. You can also find general class information on the WVU PA website:
http://www.hsc.wvu.edu/som/PA/Curriculum.aspx

Advanced Forensic Photography                               3 hours
General Pathology                                                     5 hours
Anatomical Pathology Techniques                              4 hours
Human Anatomy for Pathologists' Assistants Lecture  3.5 hours
Human Anatomy Lab                                                4 hours
Basic Microanatomy                                                 1 hour

It goes without saying that classes at other PA schools are going to be slightly different, but I believe that this is a good representation of what you can expect.

Although it seems like there are a lot of hours of class time, the reality is that some classes can be cut short if the material is finished early or classes can be canceled due to holidays. Judging a workload solely by the number of hours spent at school is not going to give you an accurate representation of how busy you'll be. Thus far, the amount of work that we have can be comparable to about 18-19 units, which is certainly busy but not so much that you need to eat, drink and sleep at school.

In addition to the above,  we are scheduled to attend 1-2 hours of lectures regarding pathology on a weekly basis. These are lectures that resident's of the medical school attend and are presided over by one of the many doctors who teach and work at the university. (The powerpoint lecture that we saw the first week was on various kinds of nevi and malignant melanomas. I definitely look forward to seeing every one of these that I can.)

Later on in the semester we'll also get a brief chance to spend a few days in the gross room and the histology room. This is to get us familiar with how the laboratories operate and we'll even get a little hands on experience.

So if you're wondering whether or not you'll be able to handle the workload, imagine taking 18-19 units of upper-division hard undergraduate science courses. The difficulty is actually not bad at all, at least not as bad as I had first thought. If you had already studied anatomy/physiology/pathology/histology during your time in undergrad and got A's in those courses, it feels more like 16-17 units. If you have photographic memory, make it 8 units. (Most of anatomy really just involves the memorization of names, structures and the relationships between those structures. What this also means is that you can very easily study anatomy before you're accepted into a PA Program and have a laid-back 1st semester. Hint-hint.)

But just because it might feel easy for you doesn't mean that you should actually take it easy! What you learn here will actually go with you for the rest of your career, so make the most of your time.