From PA School to Coding
“My name is Angelo and I am an ex-PA Student.”
Even typing those words still stings somewhat, as my decision to drop out of PA school was made not too long ago. Since 2011, everything I had done was for the sole purpose of eventually working in the medical field as a mid-level provider. My undergrad degree and all of my work experience had been geared towards the medical field and it was all I knew how to do. In Fall of 2019, I was finally accepted into FIU’s PA Program. It felt like a dream come true, as out of the thousands of applicants I was one of the lucky 45 that made it past everything. Over the didactic year, the program did their best to cram 4 years worth of medical school into our brains. I kept on pushing myself to keep on learning, all the while telling myself all of this would be worth it once I graduate and start working as a PA. Even after a few of my cohort dropped out, I stayed strong and kept my grades up all the way through the didactic year. Then, clinical rotations came rolling around..
At the start of 2021, it was finally time for all of us students to use the knowledge gained during didactic year in a more practical setting. I started my first clinical rotation at an internal medicine practice, and it started off as well as it could have. All of the staff and my preceptor were very helpful and friendly, and it was refreshing to get to do more hands-on stuff like giving shots and drawing blood. However, after the second week, I noticed something new that would eventually lead me to make a life-altering decision. I noticed that every time I woke up, I would dread coming into the clinic. What’s more, every time I came home from the clinic, I would feel absolutely drained physically, mentally, and even emotionally. Resting immediately after coming home was not possible, as I would still have to finish writing patient’s notes in the clinic’s EMR, write those same notes for my program’s EMR, and find time to study for my monthly end-of-rotation exam that was coming up at the end of January. By the time I was done with those things, it’d usually be well past 1:00am and I would need to wake up at 6:00am if I wanted to get to the clinic on time. It was a vicious cycle that started to wreak havoc on my mental health, and I found it harder and hard to focus on matters at hand. I started to question if this was the life I wanted. With about a decade’s worth of work to get to that point in my life, it HAD to be worth it, right? Unfortunately, it got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore. I ended up dropping out of the program before the end of the month.
Dropping out of PA school was a difficult decision to make. I was giving up on a master’s degree and the opportunity of having a well-paying job. Although dropping out meant I didn’t have to deal with the daily life-draining routine, I still felt depressed thinking that everything I had done was for nothing. I was at a point in my life where I wasn’t too sure what I was going to do.
A few days after dropping out, I reached out to a few friends to tell them about the decision I made. One of them told me that I should look into software engineering. That friend was currently working as a software engineer for Boeing but his undergrad degree wasn’t even in CS. It was because of him that I realized you didn’t need a CS degree to be successful as a software engineer. He told me that he’s worked with many software engineers that have unrelated degrees, with some of them being self-taught or bootcamp graduates. He directed me to freecodecamp.org and told me to go through some challenges to get a taste of coding. After a few days of working through those challenges, I started to realize that maybe coding was right up my alley. Feeling as though I needed something more structured than straight self-study, I asked him if he could recommend any bootcamps. He told me he has a friend who graduated with a bachelor’s in business, went to a bootcamp, and ended up getting a job with Amazon as a software engineer. I found out that bootcamp was Flatiron and applied shortly thereafter. And so, I find myself here!
So far, the first two weeks have been challenging, as coding is still new to me. Despite the challenging nature, I find that I am enjoying pushing myself to learn more and more. More importantly, I feel like I am currently in a better position mentally and emotionally compared to my time in my clinical rotation. The decision I made to drop out of PA school is starting to feel less and less dire, and I’m becoming more hopeful going down this path. By the end of it all, I hope I’ll be able to look back on everything and tell myself that this was all worth it.
