Curious how long PA school is? Discover the 2–3 year PA program timeline, what to expect, and study tools to survive as a first-year PA student.
So, how long is PA school, really? Most PA programs are intense 2–3 year journeys packed with medical knowledge and clinical experience. As a first-year PA student, I’ve quickly realized that no matter how long PA school is, it demands more than just a few cram sessions. In this blog, I’ll give a quick run-down of what PA school is and how I’ve used Sketchy and other tools to help me succeed!
PA school is a graduate-level program to become a certified physician assistant. The first program started in 1965 at Duke University in response to the growing shortage of healthcare providers. The first class consisted of four Navy Corpsmen who had previously served in a medical capacity, and today, students often begin PA school with thousands of patient contact hours as medical assistants, paramedics, or patient care technicians. During their schooling, they receive a combination of didactic (classroom) instruction as well as hands-on clinical rotations.
A typical PA program is between 2–3 years, divided equally between didactic instruction and clinical rotations. At the end of the program, students take the Physician Assistant National Certifying Exam (PANCE) and complete their state’s licensing process. Then they can begin working in any medical specialty under the supervision and licensure of a physician.
The first year of a typical 2–3 year PA school program kicks off with a review of anatomy and physiology. My program began with these courses, along with a cadaver lab and a few other classes. Then we transitioned to a more clinical education, learning all of pharmacology and pathophysiology in just two months. We are currently rotating through four “systems” classes every two months, where we learn how to diagnose and treat conditions in different systems such as cardiology, dermatology, and endocrinology. All the while, our clinical medicine course trains us to create differential diagnoses, write SOAP notes, and perform interviewing and physical exam skills with standardized patients.
Each PA school structures its didactic year differently. For example, some schools pair the pharmacology and pathophysiology courses with each system, stretching them out over most of the didactic year. However, the general format of anatomy and physiology, followed by pharmacology, clinical medicine, and systems courses is pretty consistent.
The clinical phase of PA school typically spans 12 months and is the second half of the program. This is where you take everything you learned in the classroom and apply it in real-world healthcare settings. You’ll rotate through various specialties like family medicine, surgery, emergency medicine, and pediatrics. It’s an intense but rewarding year that pushes your knowledge and skills to the next level. If you’re wondering how long PA school is, this year of hands-on training is a major part of that timeline.
Once clinical rotations are complete, the final stretch before becoming a practicing PA involves certification and licensure. You must pass the Physician Assistant National Certifying Exam (PANCE) and complete any state-specific licensing requirements. This phase typically takes 2 to 3 months, depending on your exam date and how quickly your paperwork is processed. While it’s not part of the academic curriculum, it’s still an essential part of the timeline when calculating how long it takes to become a PA.
PA school is a bit like drinking from a fire hose. Most days, we are in class from nine to four, with three-hour classes in the morning and afternoon. Each lecture is packed with information that usually takes me several hours to understand outside of class and later memorize for exams. You don’t fully understand how long PA school is until you’re living through the packed schedule, weekly exams, and constant studying. In the fall, we had an exam almost every week. Now we have designated weeks for midterms and finals, when we become test-taking machines and take four exams in a week!
Some common struggles my classmates and I have faced involve figuring out how to understand, organize, and memorize material as efficiently and effectively as possible. Many strategies we used in undergrad are no longer effective because there is simply too much information and not enough time. For example, taking immaculate iPad notes on each lecture point is a very effective way to organize information, but not practical with such a large amount of information. On the other hand, when memorizing facts, reading a drug name and its mechanism of action takes only a few seconds, but on top of all the other oddly named pharmaceuticals you have to cram into your brain, it’s not effective at all.
When learning how to understand and organize material in PA school, I quickly realized I didn’t have the time to take notes on every bullet point. Rather, I’ve learned to restrict my notes to more complicated material or categorical items I need to distinguish in charts or diagrams. Ideally, I’ll spend an hour or two after each class taking notes on complex points and saving simpler facts to memorize later with flashcards. That being said, some of my classmates love having personal notes on all the information and make time to compile it in their format. Some have even joined forces and created shared documents to make lecture outlines together.
One of your biggest assets in PA school is your classmates! Collaborating on lecture outlines at the whiteboard helps you pool your knowledge and adds an extra layer of learning by allowing you to teach the material to each other. Plus, studying on your own can get old after a while, and it’s nice to mix it up!
While reviewing lectures, I often stumble on a topic that is difficult to understand. This is where Sketchy comes in! Watching Sketchy clarifies much of my confusion and creates a knowledge base from which to build off of. I also love using ChatGPT to understand the “why” behind facts, like a disease symptom or medication side effect. Instead of memorizing this information, I ask ChatGPT why these processes occur, and the program returns very simplified physiology explanations that enable me to retain the information much more effectively. There are tons of other great resources I’ve used for an extra boost in understanding material, like Cram the Pance podcasts, Osmosis videos, and NinjaNerd on YouTube.
Once I’ve taken notes and gathered an understanding of all the lectures, it’s time to memorize! My best friend in PA school? Anki. If you haven’t used it before, Anki is a downloadable flashcard program that enables long-term retention by scheduling your cards based on your accuracy of memory. During class, I convert my professor’s PowerPoints into JPGs and use Anki’s Image Occlusion add-on to cover up items and create flashcards. This allows me to listen intently during lecture while creating my study material. The Anki grind can get pretty real, usually requiring me to go through a thousand flashcards per test. I keep up my endurance by timing myself and switching up locations. I even got an Anki remote and learned how to do flashcards on the treadmill! Several of my classmates use Quizlet to memorize material or read through the PowerPoints multiple times and talk through material to memorize it.
As I mentioned before, Sketchy has been an invaluable resource for understanding and memorizing information. I started using Sketchy during pharmacology, and I honestly don’t know how I would have survived the two-month intensive course without it! After every lecture, I would search Sketchy for the drug names we discussed and bookmark them to watch later, which often for me is running on the treadmill or in the shower. Time is precious, people.
Watching Sketchy takes time, but it saves time in the long run. When I sit down to go over a lecture after watching the sketch of that topic, I can tell the difference. I go through material so much faster with an already established foundation of knowledge, and random facts that otherwise wouldn’t stick are already solidified as Sketchy symbols. After pharmacology, I used Sketchy for microorganisms and diseases, and it was so helpful for grasping these concepts.
I’ve even taken Sketchy a step further and created review sheets with Sketchy screenshots. I sometimes even add drawings myself to include information from my professors that wasn’t in the sketch. These have been helpful as I progress through my education and can reference or add to my Sketchy drawings. For example, I loved Sketchy’s video on the coagulation cascade, but needed an extra character for thrombomodulin. I drew in a “thromboMOMdulin” mother beaver to remove the “thrombeaver” from the clotting cascade! She’s got some pretty nice protein C and S earrings, too!
You can probably tell by now that I’m a major Sketchy fan. When I tell you that I am constantly imagining Sketchy lessons in my head during exams, I am not exaggerating. Sketchy gives you visual mnemonics that you watch instead of spending hours creating yourself. These clever mental pictures cut the study time in half. Instead of trying to cram a side effect in your head, you just remember the Sketchy character having a seizure or feeling nauseous. And when disease names are all swimming together, all you have to do is recall the little bear tripping on sausage links. Later during recall, the information resurfaces much faster because you don’t have to walk through all the steps you used to memorize an item; the picture is already there! Your clinical application of material is easy with Sketchy since your understanding has a strong foundational base. I rarely have to go back and relearn a drug mechanism or suffix from pharmacology. On top of all that, it makes learning fun! Who wouldn’t want to watch a video of jousting knights instead of reading a PowerPoint?
If you’ve been wondering how long PA school is, the answer is typically 24–36 months, but the experience can feel like much longer with the volume of material packed in. That being said, I have been surprised by how much I enjoy the content. Medicine is so interesting, and when you’re passionate about something, it is worth the work! Thankfully, tools like Sketchy can make this intense journey more manageable and even enjoyable.
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