PAs make a great salary. The job is consistently ranked among the happiest occupations out there, and I don’t doubt it for a second. It’s a great gig. I love being PA and I LOVE surgery, but it isn’t hard for me to imagine being unhappy at work either.
My first gig out of school I was working 40-60 hours with one doc — side by side all week. We got along great and had a ton fun. I learned so much and I’m grateful to him for his patience, but I can easily picture a world where it wouldn’t have worked out so well. A world of horror and despair, and I heard about a few of them that I’ll talk about in just a second.
When I graduated, I was looking for someone to pay me, that’s it. I wasn’t thinking too much about interviewing the person I’d be working with. What if he’d been an awful surgeon? What if he were mean? What if he did something awful like chew with his mouth open?
I don’t know what I would have done. I was in a terrible place financially at the time I took my first job. I had created a HUGE mess, and I didn’t even really know it. I had my head in the sand thinking, “I’ll earn my way out of this without ever looking at the actual numbers.” I was a mess and had no clue how to handle any money. If I had quit that job, we would have been begging on the street, tin cup in hand trying to gather enough coins to pay my students loans.
Thankfully for me (and my wife), it was a non-issue. He was a great surgeon, a good teacher, and we got along well, but that isn’t always the case.
Just before graduation one of my best friends in PA school landed her dream job. Orthopedic surgery. She had been an athletic trainer, and this was all she’d dreamed about for three years. She also got an AMAZING starting salary. My eyes popped out of my head when she told me. I gotta say I was a little green with envy.
Three months later they let her go. Not because of anything she did. They let her go because they hadn’t done the math right and they couldn’t afford to pay her. I’ve heard this story more than a few times.
How would you cover that gap? What would you do? Could you afford to be out of work for a few months while you look for a new job and get credentialed at a new hospital? I know it might not be possible right out of school, but how quickly are you going to be building your “emergency” fund?
Just this morning I was working with a nurse who’s paying her son’s student loans until he gets a job. Ugh. As soon as you graduate, those payments kick in whether you’re working or not.
I’m going to show you how to get out in front of these issues. You can’t solve it all in a day or with one paycheck, but if you do the right things from the day of graduation (or even better from well before graduation), it can change the whole course of your career and your life.
Let me show you how. This weekend I’m releasing a brand-new book. It’s called The Physician Assistant Student’s Guide to Money: From Broke to Debt Free and Beyond.
The book is fantastic and will open your eyes to some very simple, but very unheard-of principles that will change your outlook the day you read them.
This weekend I’m also including the audio version (it was much harder to record than I would have thought), a brand-new Mini Course on Test Taking, access to the brand-new PAER APP, and access to Brian’s Brain (a new secret “podcast”).
You think just because I’ve paused the podcast that I’ve been lazy? No way. I’ve got a ton of stuff coming your way and it starts this weekend.
Get your copy and all of your bonuses here:
The Physician Assistant Student’s Guide to Money: From Broke to Debt Free and Beyond.
Brian Wallace