US Careers Online - Medical Assisting

With medical assisting you learn the front office skills and you're also learning the back office skills. So you can decide do I want to go further in my career or do I want to just stay here? Am I happy right here in the front office? So that's one of the things that draws the students to medical assisting. The clinical practicum starts for the second year students in the spring semester. So we place them in their clinic locations and then the student goes out into the clinic and they get real hands-on experience with real patients. So the skills that they learn in the classroom they now get to utilize on real people in real life. You are involved with actual folks. You're not working on the mannequins. You're not working on classmates. You're working with people who have actual medical issues. Our main goal is to make sure when you get to that clinic you hit the floor running. I never want you to go to that clinic and feel like you do not have the skills. That's why you come here. That's why you have classroom time. So we make sure when you get in that clinic the only thing that you need to ask is where's the computer? How do I turn it on? And you're going to go from there. We have seen tremendous talent come out of the program. We've hired several of our medical assistant students into the practices and the caliber of work that they provide and the health care that they provide to our patients is an excellent addition to our practices and our teams. I love being a medical assistant because I love helping people. So if someone really enjoys helping people, I feel like really grateful every day especially whenever the patients are very thankful that I'm there. I'm giving them results that they like to hear. I mean you build relationships so when you call them they'll say there's my girl or you know things like that. We allow our students to work hand in hand with our providers, with our patients. We also provide them access to our EMR system. This gives them real-world experience and allows them to hone in on their clinical skills. When a student starts their practicum assignment with us, they may be unsure if this is what they want to do. If they have the right skill set at the end of the practicum, we want them to feel confident to have garnered their clinical skills in a way that they know when they leave us this is the medical field that they want to be in. Biology degree, it's just class after class about cells. I don't get to step in that hospital or a doctor's office. I want to get in the health care field and eventually become a PA. So I know this is a good step but in that way as I'm in the actual setting in the environment and doing real hands-on work, it just makes a difference in biology. We place our students in various locations, family practice, pediatrics, orthopedics. If they have a what they enjoy, that gives them an opportunity to see if, you know, hey is this my path or no, I want to try a different path. Cardiology, orthopedics, you know, they have a very wide variety of practices to choose from.