This post has many titles...

1) Progress.

2) "They signed you, Bill! Now you're a law!"

3) I'm in.

4) Febrifuge and The Big Flat Envelope

You may choose whichever one you like best. The upshot is, this is apparently no longer a blog about getting into PA school. As of yesterday's mail, it's a blog about getting ready to go to PA school. In Chicago. Six months from now.

I'll bullet some of the more salient points in a minute, but before I get too deep, I'd like to tell the story of going out there to the interview (which was less than two weeks ago; it's not like I've been holding back, people). And right now, I have some Tiger Woods PGA Tour golf to take care of. It's urgent. Unavoidable. Can't get out of it. Sorry.

Then later, I have a Bond movie to go see with M. Giant, in observation of a tradition that goes back at least as far as Goldeneye... although I could swear there was some Timothy Dalton back there someplace. Hey, I'm a busy cat. The point is, reliable sources tell me that having fun now is vital to my surviving Year One, which is worse than 4-year-med-school year one by some hard-to-pin-down factor.

Oh, and just so there's not a lot of confusion on this point, let me lay down what the heck a Physician Assistant is, and does. Or wait, let me have the AAPA do it for me.

Some sub-bullets:

a) Hey, Chicago. Cool.

Yes! Plus, although I won't mention the school by name, I think it's sweet that there's a four-year school in the same university. That's because most of the time, that's better for the facilities, the faculty, and the reputation of the program in the local medical community. Way too many of the PA programs I researched were founded in 2000 or later, and belong to schools that had heretofore been largely about non-medical pursuits (nursing is very close, but not the same). I also think it's cool that there are PT students, Pathologist Assistant students, and yes, even the podiatry students around. It's an interesting university, in that of the several hundred people attending, nearly all are grad students. So it'll sort of be a Bizarro Bennington for me.

Note: it's not the University of Chicago. Which is too bad, because in one of the Indiana Jones movies, I'm pretty sure he taught archaeology at U of C. House went to Hopkins and then Michigan; they haven't revealed where the Scrubs people went to school, but it seems Californiform; and I honestly don't care where the one PA I've ever seen on TV went. That's about when ER started sucking.

b) So, why this school specifically?

I already pointed out the diversity of programs, which means not everyone I meet will be doing what I'm doing; I consider this to have been one of my not-so-secret weapons last year in Post-Bac. The facilities are crazy good; wi-fi building, digital projectors, and the best anatomy lab I've ever seen, for serious. There's a flat screen monitor and one of those goo-resistant keyboards like at oil change joints mounted on a bracket above each and every dead body. There's a decent fitness center, and a pimpin' fake office with fake exam rooms, used for fake exams of fake patients. See how my theatre training is going to be useful? Mm-hmm.

Airfare to Chicago is pretty cheap; it's like taking an even more inconvenient bus, really. And I like that the degree my school offers is the Master of PA Practice, which is far cooler than the standard Master of PA Studies. I mean really; I don't want a graduate degree in studying something, I want a graduate degree in doing it. (For the record, the only other school I know of that offers a cooler-sounding PA degree is Yale, which awards the Master of Medical Science. Swanky!)

Okay, enough for now. I'm gonna wear a white coat (sometimes). I'm gonna make (fairly) decent cash. I'm gonna heeeeeeeal the sick. I'm gonna play golf.

In fact, I'm gonna play golf right now. The digital character that sorta looks like me will be trying to make the cut at Pebble Beach this afternoon. Wish him luck.