Hi! My name is Nidhi Patel-Joshi & my story’s a little twisted, so here it goes..

I want to start this page to help pre-PA students on their journey. After battling with a lot of personal struggles, I was ready for a change from pre-med to pre-PA. I really didn’t know anything about the PA field & after much research, when I finally decided to pursue this route, I didn’t find anyone who I can relate to. Blogs and Instagram has helped me connect to many people that have helped me, so hopefully I can be of help to some of you.

Since you’ll probably wonder about the stats:

HCE 810 | PCE 7000 & counting | shadowing PA 348; shadowing MD 100 | volunteering 440

2016-2017: CASPA calculated sGPA 2.84 overall 2.94

2018: 1st time applying; 33 schools. 3 interviews. 2 waitlists. [tried to get the GPAs above 3.0, shadowing & pt care hours] sGPA & overall 3.07 last 60 3.82

2019: 25 schools. 1 interview & denied. [finished my MPH, got CHES certification + same efforts as last year] sGPA & overall 3.08 last 60 3.7

2020: 32 schools. 4 interviews. 4 acceptances. [repeated 2 Cs from undergrad science classes]

sGPA & overall 3.08 last 60 3.7. Total 264 units (this becomes important in calculating GPA more on this in another post!)

GRE 297 😬 (most of my schools didn’t need GRE, some waived it with MPH)

This has been, hands-down, the hardest thing I’ve ever done. To pick myself back up, rejection after rejection, and think of ways to improve my application in different categories was challenging. Here’s to documenting more of PA school and helping as many people as I can because I found so much support from other people, please feel free to reach out!

-Nidhi Patel-Joshi MPH, CHES, PA-S1