Emory PA Program

April 8, 2025

Inside the Emory PA Program: Admissions, Curriculum, and Keys to Success [Episode 603]

Show Summary

In this episode of Admissions Straight Talk, the Assistant Professor and Director of Admissions at the Emory University Physician Assistant Program, Allan Platt, offers an insightful look into the Emory University’s Physician Assistant Program. He breaks down the program’s distinctive curriculum, including its unique approach to anatomy, and shares valuable advice for prospective students. Allan dives into Emory’s PA program admissions process, emphasizing the importance of clinical experience, community service, and thoughtful personal narratives. He also explains the blinded Multiple Mini Interview (MMI) format and highlights common mistakes applicants should avoid.

Show Notes

Welcome to the 603rd episode of Admissions Straight Talk.

This interview is all about getting accepted to PA school, specifically to the Emory PA program. In addition to listening to today’s interview, I’d like to invite you to download Accepted’s free guide, The Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Physician Assistant. Grab your free copy for advice on selecting the best PA programs for you, writing your personal statement, interviewing effectively and simply presenting the best application you possibly can.

Today’s guest, Allan Platt, graduated with a bachelor’s in health systems engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a BS in medical science from the Emory University School of Medicine Physician Assistant Program in 1979, and a Masters of Medical Science and Career Physician Assistant from Emory in 2006. From 1984 until 2004, he was the program coordinator and physician assistant at the Georgia Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center at Grady Health Systems. He has co-authored or authored several books and publications. In 2002, Allen received the Paragon Teacher of the Year Award from the AAPA, the SAAPA President’s Award in May 2007, the Dean’s Teaching Award for the Emory University School of Medicine, and the GAPA Circle of Honor Award in 2015. He’s a distinguished fellow of the AAPA since 2018. He is currently Director of Admissions at the Emory University’s Physician Assistant Program and teaches Hematology and Professional Issue Topics.

I’m really honored to have you on the podcast, Allan. That’s a lot of awards.

It’s been a good career.

I’m going to ask you my usual opening question and that is, can you give an overview of the Emory PA program focusing on its more distinctive elements?

Yes, we’re part of the original group of PA programs that started in the early 70s. Duke was number one, but the doctor who started the Duke program came from Emory. I want to set that record straight. He was an Emory undergraduate. He was an Emory medical student. He did his residency at some Harvard place. Then he came back as chief of medicine here at Emory. And then he got the idea to take medical school from four years to three, which sounds like PA. Then Duke recruited him away and that’s where he actually started the PA profession. So Duke will always be number one. But just know, yes, the founder came from Emory.

Okay, I’ll remember that.

So really we’ve been around a while, we have an integrated healthcare system that our students can learn in that is fabulous. We’ve been doing this a while, so we’re stable. We’re ARC-PA certified and even with COVID hit, we could go to Zoom in a day and all our students graduated on time. So we have a lot of horsepower to get our students to the finish line. So I think that makes Emory fairly unique.

We also have dissecting anatomy, which a lot of programs don’t. Our students get a body and they dissect it, which takes a lot of time. It’s pretty intense. We have an integrated POCUS program, which is ultrasound training, which is the next big thing in technology. And I think our program is just getting started with that. We’ve been doing it now for about four or five years. So those are the things that I think keep us unique. We’ve got a great healthcare system here in Atlanta and across the Southeast. And we don’t have much snow, we just had a little bit, so.

Well, I’m in Los Angeles. We don’t even have rain.

Could you just talk a little bit about the curriculum itself? You’ve given a great overview of the background, which is definitely distinctive. But could you talk about the curriculum a little bit?

Yeah, our curriculum starts fall semester when our students get here. They go through the dissecting anatomy, learn the whole physical exam, the whole history, medical ethics course, and then a little foundations course. And then we go through modules. We go through every body system just like specialties, just like we practice. And those go for a whole year. We talk about cardiology, pulmonary, neurology. And within those modules, they’re learning everything about the pharmacology, the physiology, the diseases, then how to prevent them, how to treat them. So we like that kind of model because it really makes sense when you learn in context. And by the end of first year, they’re pretty prepared to go out into the clinics and actually take care of patients. Even during our first year, we have our students going into hospitals and seeing real patients.

They aren’t responsible for them, but they do a history, a physical, and it’s all graded and proctored and it gets them comfortable in the hospital environment, and we give them good guidance for that. We have actors that come and will play roles as patients. That’s our sim center and our ASC suites all through their first year. So we do a lot of simulation. We like to do things where nobody gets hurt and our students feel comfortable when they get out into the clinics and actually are taking care of patients.

The clinical year is totally different. Again, it’s all rotating through all the different clinics and hospitals here in Atlanta through the Emory Healthcare System. And we have ties all over the Southeast, all over the US also, where students can rotate.

Now, when I was preparing for the call, I saw on the curriculum description something that looked very, very intriguing to me, and it was the Learning Society component. What is that?

You know, we break up our students into groups of eight to nine and pair them with two faculty, one who’s one of the teaching faculty, and then we have a community PA who’s helping us out, who’s doing 40 hours of work and, you know, taking care of patients. Faculty may be working one day a week. So it gives a good yin-yang perspective for the students. And we meet with them weekly. We have Wednesday afternoons, and we do case-based learning. We’ll just throw up a case on a whiteboard and just talk about it.

How do we try and diagnose and treat this patient in a practical way? And it’s more for mental relief. We go sit on the lawn, we go out and take walks. But it’s not in the traditional classroom. It’s more relaxed. And the faculty advisors get to really know their students. Students know their faculty. They can write recommendations for them for future jobs and whatever. So it is a great way for not having the whole class involved, but you get a personal relationship.

That sounds nice. And are these groups set up the same throughout the two years or is it…

Same groups through the whole two years. So even when they’re out on clinic land, they all come back to campus, at least at the end of the rotation. And we’ll meet up for coffee and just see how things are going.

What kind of academic background do you like to see in your students?

Well, you can have a degree in anything. We’ve had music majors, nuclear engineers, you name it. We’ve had every background. As long as you get the prereqs, you’re great. My philosophy is the best bachelor’s degree to get today is BS in nursing. And you say, what? A nurse? Yes. One, the high demand. comes out as a bachelor’s degree. You get instantly hired. You get excellent clinical training at a high pay and you can apply to nurse practitioner or PA school. So that’s the degree that I think is the best one for your money. Absolutely. But really anything else, as long as you get our prereqs and get the clinical experience, which we highly value, you’re ready for PA school.

Is there any GPA that you’d like to see? I have a bet, but besides that.

Yeah, the minimum is 3.0. If you don’t have that, your application stops. So there’s no further review. But really the average of someone who gets an interview and gets admitted is 3.6 to 3.7. So it is a factor in our scoring system. However, people with low GPAs can counterbalance that with clinical experience hours and high patient responsibility, like combat medics and RNs and ICUs. You know, they’re going to rate really high on our scale as far as the clinical experience. Most people have MA experience, which is our level one experience.

So it sounds like you have a fairly quantitative scoring system.

We try, it’s a 360 look at not only GPA, that’s one component, but also we look at leadership and being involved in community service. We are a mission to underserved populations. That’s part of the heart of our program. So we look at what did you do in volunteering? Missions speak a lot to us, like going abroad and doing healthcare. Those things rank high in points. So we score all those things, your narratives aside, did you really look at us, did people come to our open houses, did they talk to our students, so they really investigated us. That ranks high for us. I can kind of tell when somebody just reads our website, you know, and they never visit us. But we have so many opportunities for them to come see us, talk to us, and really see what we’re about, and we want people to apply to us that our mission fits with their mission.

And I noticed that you don’t require the GRE or the PA-CAT. What should an applicant do? I’m sure that’s a tremendous relief to most of your applicants, but what should an applicant do who doesn’t have a great GPA? Let’s say they did take the prerequisites. They don’t have a great GPA. They’ve been out of school for several years. What can they do to show that they can handle the academics, the curriculum?

I think mainly if they just take the prerequisites and show us that they’re doing well in that because the anatomy, physiology, those are the courses that they’re going to be hit with in PA school. So seeing that they can do that is that’s a good tell.

They would retake. Take a few of those if they haven’t taken them.

Exactly. And their clinical experience, like I say, would trump GPA. So knowing they’ve been in years taking care of patients at a high level, that really helps their score. So we have athletic trainers and combat medics, like I say, and paramedics who’ve been in the job five, six years, who may not have had a stellar, you know, 3.2, 3.1. But I would say the clinical hours and what they did would help their whole score and raise them up to levels where we want.

Okay, great, great advice. Does the Emory PA program value shadowing?

Shadowing’s okay. I recommend people do it because then they meet PAs and nurse practitioners, doctors, talk to them all and decide this is the path for them. But we don’t count those hours at all. We count hands-on clinical care of patient hours. So I know some schools only require shadowing, but we require really taking care of patients. Because that’s what we found the most valuable.

Shadowing, again, it’s valuable to make sure you know you’re getting, you’re picking the right profession. You’ve got to get it behind the doors. And it’s hard to get behind the doors and just shadow. Because with HIPAA rules, you just can’t walk in and say, hey, I want to shadow a PA Really, you have to get a job or volunteer at a hospital or clinic and get the badge, the name badge, wear the appropriate vest and then you can go behind the doors and really see what goes on and talk to the different professions.

Right, I sometimes say that shadowing is a good place to start your explanation of a healthcare field. It’s a terrible place to end it.

Yes.

Now you mentioned community service a minute ago. What role does non-clinical community service play in the admissions process? And I wonder if you could distinguish this. There’s serving in a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter or something like that, but there also might be tutoring underprivileged kids. There might be, I don’t know, translating for lower income individuals or people who don’t speak English, period. Is that valued the same or are there differences?

No, we value all of that. All those hours count for us. We look at what did you do? So the description of what you did in service, because I’ll see that, okay, you served an underserved population here doing what you did. And that ranks five higher points. So we do add multipliers to the hours. It gives you bonus points. If you work with underserved people and you’re, again, doing healthcare things, we like that, but you can be doing other things, not healthcare related, and are you working out of your comfort zone?

We like to see people who will step out and maybe do work at a homeless shelter or just step out of their comfort zone. So those are kind of the things we look for and we’ll actually add bonus points to the hours that you accumulate. So all hours count. And most of our students have over 700-800 hours of community service. That’s a lot, but that’s what we do in our program; it has a farm worker project and a good Samaritan clinic. We give back to the community as students.

Beautiful. That’s great. Now the MRPA website lays out pretty clearly the minimum amount of clinical experience. I think it was 2000 hours. That’s a year of work. You’re a full-time worker.

Can you provide suggestions on effectively portraying that experience in the CASPA or in the supplemental application?

Yeah, you really want to put a description of what did you do in your job. Because I’ll give you an example. One job is like a clinical research coordinator. Well, for research, we don’t count bench research. For us, that’s not patient care. But some clinical coordinators do all the vital signs, EKGs, talk to patients, educate them. And see, that is clinical care, that’s working with the patient. So as long as your description is there, we can read it and say, yes, that is at an MA level or clinic assistant level. And we do count that. That’s important. So if there’s ever any question, we have people just send us an email, say, hey, does this count? And we’ll let you know. Most things do count. Even dental assisting, yes, dentist the mouth is medical. So that works. We even count scribing.

A lot of people don’t know about scribing. It’s probably an easy job for college students to get because they’ll train you in medical technology. You know how to work on iPad and the docs hate it. So they want you to do the whole medical history and all on the electronic medical record. You get to see the whole encounter, talk to patients, talk to the docs, talk to whoever the health care providers are. So we count that experience. I know some programs don’t.

So always talk to the program and say does this count before you spend a whole year doing something that won’t count.

That sounds like great advice too. Now you mentioned that the minimum is 2000 hours. Could you discuss the average number of clinical hours in your matriculation?

The range is always 2001 all the way, but we have people in careers who’ve been doing this for like 10 years, you know, and now want to be a PA. But the average of someone who gets an interview and gets in is about 5,000 hours.

Five thousand hours. That’s about two and a half years then.

Yeah. So we have, it’s been more, I’d say a trend now where it used to be people were coming out of careers. Now it’s people coming out of college, ready to be going to PA school and they’re working their way through college to get those hours and then apply. So the hours are falling, coming down, I would say. And on average, we have less and less people who are out there, you know, five, six years in a career.

Now, Emory provides more specifics on its website in terms of instructions for the supplemental application, but it also asks for an Emory-specific narrative statement and requests that applicants write a concise narrative stating your reasons for wanting to attend Emory PA program. What is concise?

Well, I get to read all those, so I would say at least keep it under a page, please. There’s no real limit. Two or three sentences is probably not enough. But you really, we want people to tell, how did you engage with us? OK, and let us know. And why are you picking us? OK, what’s unique about us that matches with your goals? So those are the questions we want to know.

And if people have researched us, come to our open houses, I even have little tours on weekends where they can come visit Emory and we’ll show them the whole campus. So things like that really mean a lot to us. And it says this person’s really serious. They know what we’re about and they’re going to be a part of our mission.

What is the interview day like at Emory?

Well, since Zoom it’s all now an MMI on Zoom. So COVID was the only good thing that came out was interviews. Cause we were into Zoom, but we found out, you know, we switched to multiple mini interviews to eliminate a lot of the implicit bias going on in interviews. We used to have group interviews, and they would befuddle me. I would just, you know, people would, I don’t know why they would make the choices they make, but this way it’s very analytic. It’s done just simple questions that are vetted and you have a few seconds to respond in a few minutes to give your response verbally to one of our faculty and they’re scoring it based on some qualitative check marks. It’s all on Likert scale. It’s scientific, it’s reproducible, it gets rid of a lot of the bias. In fact, our interviewers don’t know anything about the candidate, they’re blinded. I’m the only one who’s biased. I read all the CASPAs, and then I recuse myself from interviewing.

I do the fun room which is question and answer with students. So really our faculty are just talking to that individual straight up and just asking them a simple question and grading their response. And we find that to be very effective. It really does hone out people who can think on their feet and really you can’t prepare for it, you can’t study for it, and you can’t use AI for that.

I think Google uses it in their interviews, why not us? But McMaster Medical School in Canada was the champion of this and we’ve adopted their model.

How many stations do you have for the MMI?

We’re going, we did have six, we’re going down to five. We think five is plenty. We do have a writing sample too, where they’ve got 20 minutes to write and it’s monitored writing on a computer. No AI allowed, but we want to see a writing sample, and it is a monitored writing sample over something. It’ll be a different question every time. But that is very telling also. Cause I’ve had people that can’t construct a paragraph and it’s like, whoa.

No AI allowed.

Are you seeing more, I mean, we’ve noticed it. Are you seeing more cliches or what I like to call plastic language in applications this cycle and last, less personality, less individuality?

You know, I didn’t really see that. I think at least the ones I, and I do get to read all the CASPA and the Emory supplementals, and really they were very thoughtful from the heart and they were really telling the story of their life. And that’s what we’re looking for. We really want to hear this. Why are you doing this journey? What’s brought you to this point? And really, I don’t think AI can help a lot with that because it’s very personal.

And so I think as people stay with their personal endeavors, their history, they’ll be fine.

Emory’s website says that it received over 2,958 applications, of which 1,282 were completed, and that you interviewed 214 people from the 1282, and that you admitted a class of 54 in the class of 2026. And that’s the one that started in 2024.

What review process does an application typically go through, and how do you decide whom to interview?

Again, we score everything in the CASPA, including clinical experience, how many hours and what did you do, volunteer hours and what did you do. We look at your leadership awards, all of those things and score all that. We look at the recommendation letters. And again, those are very important. We read those, especially those from clinicians. My advice is really don’t get one from a professor where you are one of 300 students. Just forget it. They write horrible letters. But it’s really, that’s why getting the job for a year working with a physician or PA side by side, they can write a beautiful letter and about your integrity about your patient care. And that’s golden to us. So those are the high value letters. And all those are scored at all fits a score high scores get the interviews and then the interviews get you an invite.

What mistakes do you commonly see applicants make either on the primary or the supplemental?

Let me count the ways. Yeah. Well, it’s, reading those supplementals where they’ll say, I really wanted to come to, they’ll name another school in the Emory narrative. I’m like, you cut and pasted. Or, you know, they can the stuff, they regurgitated off the website and they didn’t really check us out. So those are the mistakes, you know, really do it by doing your investigation, speak from your heart, don’t try and make up stuff you think you way want to hear. So I think we have a pretty good way of sniffing those out.

I know sometimes it’s, you know, I want to go to this particular place because of the outstanding faculty, the fantastic program and, you know, employment opportunities. That doesn’t tell you anything.

How do you view letters of intent or update letters from waitlisted applicants or even applicants early in the process whom you haven’t heard from you rather? And maybe they’re getting a little jittery.

Right, we try and reach out and tell you where they are in the process. And really, even at the interview, I sit with them. We call it the fun room. They meet with me, and I have current students with me in the Zoom room just to answer questions. But the final thing I tell them is, look, it’ll be radio silent till usually we get the notices out in fall. And I’ll tell them which month we think we’ll get it out. And then you’ll know. And it’ll be by email. It’ll all go out in one day.

And you’ll know either you got an invite and here’s your instructions or you’ll be on the wait list. Now what we do do is tell you what your rank is on the wait list like you’re number one, you’re number two, you’re number three.

You will tell me your number X out of Y.

Exactly. And it’s really to let them be informed to make informed decisions. And I tell them straight up, if you get an offer from another program and you’re on our wait list, take the offer. You know, just be a PA. We need more PAs. Don’t wait on Emory and don’t wait on us. But we will go down that wait list as people turn us down and go to other schools. And we know people are going to not take us. It’s just a fact. People are getting cheaper, closer support, better, you know, it’s all those whatever the answer is. Emory may not be the answer for them. As long as they let us know as soon as they know we can offer the seat to the next person. So we continually update that wait list and people want to know where they are now we’ll tell them but if they get an offer I say take it, don’t wait, you know, be a PA.

Do you waitlist people before interviewing them?

No, no, no, no, who’s interviewed is a potential get an ask.

The numbers, your chances are, you know, astronomically higher, about five times higher once you get an interview.

Yeah, once you get an interview, you’re in the golden group. You’re close. I tell them straight up, you should be applying to the top 100 schools and all of them will want you. So you can be choosy. You can choose the program that’s right for you.

Now let’s say somebody isn’t accepted and they still would like to go to Emory and become a PA. What suggestions do you have for them?

I tell them to reach back to us and let us help them. And usually if they made it to an interview, their application was fine. Okay. And I tell them, you really just keep doing what you’re doing because you did everything right. And get a more clinical experience, get more volunteer hours, it’s not going to hurt. But now you know the MMI process, you know how to deal with that, practice with your friends and family so you don’t get nervous or whatever, and then come back.

And if you don’t get an offer from another school, please come back. We do know people who don’t get an interview want to know, we will even review their CASPAs and give them pointers of where they can boost their application. Yeah, we do. So, I mean, we want people to succeed and it doesn’t have to be with Emory. We want them to be a PA somewhere. The world needs more PAs. So it’s our goal to get them involved and get them… at least tell them where we are and where they can rise up to make sure they would get an interview. So yes, we do help them. M assistant director will spend a great review with the CASPA and just go over things and give them pointers of what to do and how to do it.

On a forward-looking note, what advice would you give to somebody who wants to apply to the Emory’s PA program, but they’re going to be a first-time applicant, they want to apply in the next cycle to matriculate in 2026?

Okay, first thing, come to one of our open houses. They’re virtual and they’re live. So you can come to Atlanta, see the campus, it’s beautiful and meet our students, or you can watch us live and we’ll be right over Zoom and you don’t have to leave your living room. There’s no excuse not to know about what we’re about. So we have four of those. One of them is coming up this Friday and then they’re posted on our website under open house. So you can just sign up for any one of those virtual or live.

But that’s the best way to really learn about it so you could write an intelligent supplemental saying, Emory? Because you visited with us. We have Q&A with students who can tell you the truth. And I say, any program that hides students from you, something’s wrong. But students ought to be able to tell you if they’re happy or not and see if they’re being educated properly. So we let our students do the question and answer with them.

Let them know where they live and how Atlanta life is and all those things people want to know. So please do that. That’s the first thing. And two, get together all your stuff and apply early. Our deadline is July 1st and we’ve moved it a whole month forward because a lot of people applied too late and never got an interview. And so people need to apply early. If they’re ready to go, go. Don’t procrastinate. So get in the pool early.

And when does the application open?

CASPA opens at the very end of, I want to say April. So whenever that first date is, we start accepting applications, but we will end July 1st.

And then they matriculate the following summer.

They will come the following, yeah, fall, summer. It’s the end of July, first week of August.

What would you have liked me to ask you?

What do I like about Emory?

What do you like about Emory?

I love the whole campus. My wife and I started here as dorm directors. She was a medical student. I was a PA student. And then we lived on campus for three years and then we went out to the burbs, had our kids, now we’re an empty nest. We moved right back to Emory. We live across the street. So I am the tour guide. We love walking the campus. We love the area. It’s not downtown Atlanta. We’re in a suburb and it’s surrounded by houses that are beautiful all around us, woods and trees and this is gorgeous. So we like the area, we like Atlanta. Atlanta has a great aquarium, a great airport. It’s very busy, but it’s a great airport and there is a lot to do. We have mountains to the north and a beach five hours away.

Where can listeners learn more about the Emory Physician Assistant Program and earning a Master’s of Health Sciences?

Yes, you just find our website. The website’s deep. It’s got stories from our students, alumni, and what’s going on with the program. So check it out.

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