I Chose Salus
Physician Assistant
Hey! My name is Patrick Hwang and here is my day in the life as a second-year Physician Assistant (PA) Studies student, just starting clinical year. In contrast to the didactic year where my schedule varies from week to week, the clinical year is eight core and two elective rotations, which each last five weeks long. For the duration of the five weeks, we attend our assigned rotation and then at the end, we take our end of rotation assessment during transition week which is the last week of the rotation.
Today I started day three of my Family Medicine rotation! I started my day off at 6 a.m. with some Honey Bunches of Oats and coffee. My commute is about 25 minutes from where I live near the Philadelphia Art Museum so I left my apartment around 7 a.m. and arrived at my rotation just before 7:30 a.m. At this rotation, I’m paired with another second-year PA student from Salus and other various students from different PA programs in Philadelphia. We started the morning off by discussing as a group some lab results from previous patients seen from days prior. In doing so, we discussed whether we need to adjust certain medication dosages or have patients follow up for further testing.
At 8 a.m. we began to see patients. So far what I have learned from rotating in Family Medicine is that patients have a wide range of reasons they present to the office, from annual physicals/well visits, referrals, medication refills, sore throats, back pain, headaches, etc. This has challenged me to be familiar in different situations from patient to patient and still provide the same level of care. At around 11 a.m - 12 p.m., depending how busy the practice is, we will break for lunch for an hour. Occasionally, a drug sales representative provides us with lunch and advertisements about a new product. One of the days they discussed with us a new treatment for COPD called Ohtuvayre, which is a new medication recently approved by the FDA with a novel mechanism of action for moderate to severe COPD patients. The sales representative also told us that a new treatment option for COPD had not been developed in the past 20 years so I was really intrigued when they presented the medication to us. After lunch, we continued seeing patients until about 4:30 p.m.
After seeing patients for the day, I stopped quickly at the grocery store to pick up some food and then arrived at home at roughly 5:30 p.m. I ate some dinner that I had meal prepped for the week, relaxed for about 30 minutes, and then got to studying. We have our end of rotation exam every five weeks; however, the exam covers a lot of different topics we are responsible for. Therefore, studying every day is much more effective than trying to cram everything in the last two weeks of the rotation. I studied for about two hours and then relaxed for the rest of the night. At around 9:30 - 10:00 p.m., I started to get ready for bed so I can be fully ready to sleep at around 11 p.m. I’m a huge believer in making sure to get enough sleep so I’m ready for anything the following day!
That’s my day in the life! I hope you enjoyed a little glimpse of my life as a second-year PA student at Salus at Drexel University!
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