What is Duke's physician assistant program looking for in applicants? [Show summary]

April Stouder, Associate Program Director and Chair of the Admissions Committee for Duke’s PA program, explores what’s unique about this top-ranked program and what applicants can do to be competitive.

A focus on primary care makes Duke's PA program unique [Show notes]

Are you preparing to become a PA, or even just considering the field? Are you wondering how to apply successfully? Our guest today is the Associate Program Director at the first US PA program, and she's going to tell you all about it.

April Stouder earned her bachelor's at Manchester College and her master's of Health Science in Duke University's PA program in 2000. From 2002 to 2012, she worked as a PA at Duke. From 2012 to 2018, she was Director of Clinical Education at Duke, and she has served as Associate Program Director and Chair of the Admissions Committee since June 2018. 

Can you give us an overview of the Duke PA program, focusing on its more distinctive elements? [1:53]

Most PA programs are two years in length, and ours is no different. Perhaps what distinguishes us a little bit is our primary care-focused mission. Not every PA program is distinctly focused on primary care, but that is a big part of our mission, training primary care PAs. We are one of the programs that's been around the longest. We were the first, established in 1965. We had a class of four graduates in 1967, and then the profession took off from there. That's part of our proud history and always something that we like to bring up, but we're definitely not a program that rests on our historic laurels; we're definitely a program that likes to evolve and improve along the way.

We are one of the larger programs in the country. We have 90 students per cohort, a total of 180 students at any given time, and approximately 40 faculty and staff. As my program director always says, we're like a giant cruise ship, a big vessel in the ocean chugging along. We're a big program, and that does distinguish us from a lot of programs out there. We're also housed at an academic medical center. There are other programs at academic medical centers, but that does distinguish us from some of the programs out there as well.

The curriculum includes one year of didactic instruction and one year of clinical. Is that pretty typical for all PA programs? [3:08]

That is pretty typical. There's a few programs out there that are a little bit longer in length; maybe they’ll start someone in their junior or senior year of college, and then they go straight into the PA program. But the more typical thing now, because the terminal degree is the master's degree, is that most folks have finished their bachelor's studies and then come to PA school as a graduate program, which is two years in length.

How has COVID affected the Duke PA program, both the didactic portion and the clinical portions? [3:45]

COVID really did a number on medical education across the country, and we were certainly no exception to that. In the spring of last year, we had students out on their clinical rotations, and we had a first year cohort of students that were used to coming into the classroom,