In PA school there are requirements that actually detract from you learning medicine. One of these is testing. Unfortunately this determines whether you become a PA or not. So one of the things you can do to become a better PA is figure out ways to improve the education you receive in spite of itself. Testing should not take up a huge part of your processing power. It’s a skill, like any other. Go on the internet and start taking a multiple choice test every day. Long, short, doesn’t matter the subject. Just take tests. You’ll start recognizing patterns unconsciously. There are only so many different ways a multiple choice test can be written and if you practice in the comfort of your own home without consequences, you’ll do great. Take some tests you know that you’ll fail just to feel what it’s like. Notice how the world doesn’t end? That’s what happens if you fail a test in PA school as well. I failed 2/3 tests in a microbiology course. The first due to lack of preparation. The second due to food poisoning prior to a red eye flight from Haiti the night before the exam. But then I made damn sure I got 98% on the final. I also happened to develop a few personal relationships in the process of reaching out to teachers to make sure I knew my shit. By no purposeful effort of my own, it also happened to be the section of the course covering RMSF. Later, I would work on the Apache Indian Reservation where 250 out of like 260 annual cases of RMSF occur.
The point is, education is not set up to educate you in the most efficient way possible. But you can outsmart it. And this is something you can do before you ever even apply. You’ve been taking MC tests your whole life. And you’ve probably been dreading them. Develop the skill. Focus on what matters. It damn sure isn’t the test.
Similarly whatever specialty you choose will have skills that require some processing power. If you’re paralyzed with indecision over lab values, ECG interpretation, and CXR like I am these days, then you will have little mental energy for what truly matters, patient interaction and critical thinking. So master the skills, by repetition, by clever mnemonics, or brute force. Doesn’t matter how. Just master skills that can be mastered. Then, focus on what matters. Again, it damn sure isn’t the test.