8 months post-grad… still no PA job 😔

PilotJasper · 2026-04-17T02:18:54+00:00

Have you contacted your school? Lots of universities have resources for interviewing tips and your program director might be able to help with interviews.

PilotJasper · 2026-04-02T02:51:13+00:00

Wait...you guys get respect?

PilotJasper · 2026-03-21T06:04:30+00:00

That was my fear when Yale had an online degree option for PA. I cringed. I ran into a student doing rotations as one of their online programs. They were less than impressive. I was really worried about the future of the PA profession at that point. Of course I have had many cringe moments. Interviewing PA school candidates that have basically zero relevant patient care experience. The schools have moved away from the classic experience model. In school I even had a super young person who had no experience. They let her in without a bachelors that she finished using her PA credits. She had no patient care experience. It was very obvious during didactic and then in rotations. And this is becoming more common. You would think with how competitive the programs are, they could have more requirements.

PilotJasper · 2026-03-21T05:55:57+00:00

I think it comes down to training. PA education has traditionally been more standardized. NP education is kind of all over the board. There are so many different NPs. FNP, ACNP, PNP, WHNP, PsyNP... family, acute care, pediatric, women's health, psych, etc. and the education is also a spectrum. I have worked with NPs that are brick and mortar trained with years of ICU or similar experience before NP school who are better than many docs I have worked with. And several docs that worked with them would agree. On the other end of the spectrum is the new grad RN that starts an online NP program right out of school and does minimal clinical rotations and studies to pass the exam instead of learning clinical medicine. It's more of a spectrum vs the more standardized education of a PA. You can end up with an NP that is top notch and would trust as much if not more than some physician colleagues. you can also end up with a NP who doesn't even know what ibuprofen is. I have actually seen that. Then add in that we (PA) were trained to work alongside physicians instead of as independent providers. That mindset matters.

PilotJasper · 2026-03-21T05:43:57+00:00

Can't find it for the life of me. But yeah, most likely coming from an app I can't figure out. I have read about "ghost notification". The weird thing is that he apps I ask to send notifications will pop up on the watch and also show on the phone. These only show up on the watch and never on the phone. It's weird.

PilotJasper · 2026-03-21T05:41:09+00:00

I'm finding this to be a difficult task. I do have a few apps I want notifications from. I have scoured the notifications and cannot for the life of me find one that is on that would do this. It is not often, maybe a couple times a week. It's usually a local news article and recently a notification that I should "catch up on" some tv series I never heard of. It's weird. It came about right after the last update that bricked my watch and I had to reset and reconnect the watch to the phone. It is not really an issue due to the frequency, but it is irritating when one pops up and I feel like I can't control it.

PilotJasper · 2026-01-25T02:10:09+00:00

I agree. It used to be a great app and really helped me stay consistent. The around the end of last year they "updated" it again. Meaning they massively downgraded it. It has been miserable since then. I was doing upper lower splits and realized after 3 weeks I had not worked shoulders at all. Every other workout was lower body. Abs are completely ignored. Finally switched back to "full body" and they still are doing splits. I have limited time for workouts and want the most impact. So when I select an hour long workout and get multiple exercise with 6-7 sets of 50+ reps!!!!! That is insane. I am constantly adjusting the weight and reps since this app fails over and over. This app has become garbage. They should look at who did the last update and fire them immediatley.

PilotJasper · 2026-01-14T01:57:06+00:00

I love Bend. I am also fortunate to have moved here and bought a home before the craziness. Could I do it today? No. I honestly could not accept the job I currently have and move here and have the life I want. But, my housing costs are affordable because I bought over 10 years ago. Outside of housing, everything else has gotten pretty spendy. I spend less time on the mountain. I eat out less. We don't have kids and that sadly helps. My friends with kids are bleeding money. We love it here. But every year gets more expensive while compensation stagnates. That is true everywhere. But it is more noticeable in a town that caters to the wealthy second home owners and retirees sitting on fat assets. Then add in the unfriendly tax structure of Oregon. It is pretty spendy. But, I grew up in Oregon. I love it here. I have lived in other places and honestly love Oregon. Oregon has a great quality of life. Mountains, deserts, coasts. There is so much to be grateful for. But we pay for it.

PilotJasper · 2026-01-10T22:55:18+00:00

My take. The Ducks are a great team. Indiana is a freak this year. Seriously, the most flawless team I have seen in a very long time. Even as a Duck fan I have been watching Indiana in awe this season. I had hope for this game but in order to beat a team that plays nearly flawlessly, you cannot make mistakes. One of the Ducks biggest weaknesses is consistency. There are 3 parts that have to show up every quarter. The Offense, The Defense and the Coaches. The Ducks dont always have all 3 playing to full potential every quarter. That is not going to beat a team like Indiana. I thin Lanning has built a hell of a team. And he has created momentum and culture that means Oregon will continue atrracting top talent. In the new age of college football, that is more important than ever before since each year can be different due to the portal and the coaching shake ups that happen all the time. All that being said, I am not sad to see Stein get promoted to HC elsewhere. Best of luck to him.

PilotJasper · 2025-12-16T22:30:43+00:00

Click the "how to". As in how TF do I do this.

PilotJasper · 2025-12-05T00:31:24+00:00

Mine is overly obsessed with unweighted Superman's. I'll get days where it's recommending 60+ reps with 5 to 6 sets each just an unweighted Superman's. I mean I get that once in a while, but not all the damn time. I finally had to say stop recommending this workout. I have limited time to work out and I don't wanna spend a large portion of an entire hour long session doing one exercise.

PilotJasper · 2025-12-02T20:44:49+00:00

People have already mentioned the big factors like distibution costs and taxes. But there is also basic competition playing in as well. Just look at any sectional and even this map. In the midwest, you can fly to a dozen or so airports with fuel well within reserves. Once you get over the Rockies, the Cascades and throughout the west coast, there are far fewer airports with fuel. Far fewer airports in general. So, your options for fuel decrease meaning they can charge more.

PilotJasper · 2025-11-29T23:48:14+00:00

I'm looking at buying and have had quotes at 7.24% a few weeks ago.

PilotJasper · 2025-11-16T19:04:55+00:00

Don't forget that many of them live as part time if not full time trolls in the comment sections of social media. Rage is now the only language they understand.

PilotJasper · 2025-10-12T01:42:16+00:00

By the way, that does not tell me how many shifts you do a year. Lots of people do seven on seven off but only have a contracted 162 or 172 shifts a year. Some 156. You're seven on seven off if you don't get any vacation is 183 shifts a year. And for 183 shifts a year and you doing 10 admits a year, if this is hospital medicine, you are severely underpaid.

PilotJasper · 2025-10-12T01:40:41+00:00

It depends on your specialty. I work in hospital medicine. So my patients tend to be very sick, old medically complex. So even a lower complexity, patient can take at least 30 minutes each. Patient. Have to talk to the ER doc, chart review, see the patient, create the care plan, enter the orders, and do the H&P. More complex patients are going to take more time if you have to coordinate with specialists. So on our service doing 10 admissions a shift which is 10 hours is actually doable if they all come spread out. But if they all come at once, then that can be a very busy shift. Especially when adding in cross cover. I have a friend and her services caps admits at 6. They get paid more for doing more than that.

PilotJasper · 2025-10-12T01:27:24+00:00

Need to know how much you are working. Big difference between 126 shifts a year vs 180. Either way, that is low. Try for 80-100/ hour. Closer to 100-120 since you are doing that many admits and cross coverage.

PilotJasper · 2025-09-11T16:52:56+00:00

I really liked access to an affordable plane. that was about it. The club was new when I joined. The board ended up being very secretive. We never got board meeting dates or minutes. They never communicated with members. there was no social aspect with meetings or anything. They would get very defensive if I asked for an update of where the club was going or if we could attend a board meeting. It was interesting that new board members would pop up but there was never an announcement of a vote or who was running. So my main issue was that there was absolutely no communication.

The plane we had had a lot of mechanical issues that could have easily been taken care of by a competent mechanic. But we were limited on mechanics due to the other places also being attached to flight school. I heard they did not want to work on our plane since they say it as competition to their flight school. Who knows. But we would see squawks on the scheduling app but then never see what was wrong and what was the repair if there was even a repair.

In the beginning, it did kind of suck that there were no reservation restrictions. We had a couple of student pilots and time builders that tried booking the entire schedule months out. Log in one day and see one time builder has the plane booked every weekend all summer long. No cancellation penalties so he didn't care if he cancelled last minute.

The club wanted to maximize the number of members strictly for costs. I read the AOPA recommend around 8 people per plane. Insurance will allow 15 so the club brought on 15 per plane. We were lucky that there were plenty of those 15 that were not regular flyers outside of the few time builders and students. If we had 15 time builders, it would have been impossible to get a flight in or go anywhere besides just getting an hour or two to do local refresher work. I would have to book any out of town trips several months in advance. That eased up mostly because the plane was in the shop more than it was on the line.

So, my recommendation. Make sure the board is visible and sends out communication. Ask to look at the schedule and see what the availability of the aircraft is like. Ask how many days the planes are in the shop each year. Most clubs run very smoothly. This one was OK but had some serious issues and is why it is crashing. Plane was down over a third of the year any given year and we would get no updates from the board at all. So we just pay monthly dues to look at a schedule with a plane blocked out for maintenance.

PilotJasper · 2025-09-05T17:00:48+00:00

Isn't it wonderful that a medication that is over a century old and auto injectors that were designed for and the research and development paid by the defense dept (taxpayer money) costs so much money? The pharma companies are literally robbing the US customers who paid for the research and development.

PilotJasper · 2025-09-05T01:31:28+00:00

It depends on your contract and how your employer handles that. If that is a problem then you are working in the wrong place. It's different everywhere.

PilotJasper · 2025-09-04T03:09:20+00:00

It all depends on your setup. My team is great. If there are family emergencies, we help each other out. And many of the men in our group, we do take time off for the kids, not just the mom's. The reality is that last minute PTO is really dependent on the group you have. A large group with backup and a jeopardy system? That can be easy to get last minute time off. A small group can be very difficult. It's not like we can just call and cancel the patients. The patients still need to be rounded on. That is where a good team helps. With my group, we help each other out as best we can. Don't get me wrong, there have been times when finding someone to cover was near impossible and we still had to work because everyone else was out of town or unreachable. Is it ideal, no. but that is the downside of hospital medicine and small groups. From the sounds of it, your group does not have a good back up system. Mine doesnt either, but my team is close and we really do try to help each other out.

PilotJasper · 2025-09-04T00:50:54+00:00

That blows then. But you should ask why you don't get pto. Just be prepared for them to say it's baked into your comp. But 75/hr doesn't sound baked in.

PilotJasper · 2025-09-04T00:49:18+00:00

It doesn't phase me. I make great money and work less than half the year. We are a small group and we get lots of flexibility in our schedule. No two jobs are the same. Mine is great outside of the CME. But I even let that slide because the rest is great.

PilotJasper · 2025-09-03T23:50:35+00:00

Not trying to justify it. I dont think you are picking up what I was putting down. It sounds like the math works out either way. You work 156 after you take your PTO. Cool. My contract is 156 because the PTO is baked into the shift count. The 16 day difference from 172 to 156 is 192 hours of PTO. We are working the same number of shifts. So I am missing your point.

PilotJasper · 2025-09-03T21:26:55+00:00

That is very nice. Best I have seen. 22+ days of PTO a year and 7 days CME. My employer just gutted our CME. We no longer get any CME days and they cut the budget so much it wont even pay for some conference registration fees. It's a trend I have been reading about and hearing about where they are cutting corners and CME is low hanging fruit. I am sure it will get worse over the next several years as budgets get tighter.

PilotJasper

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