I started with the Andrews School in May 2002 and graduated in January 2003. Within a week after graduation, I had a part-time job with a small company where I did ER reports. This job eventually blossomed into doing ER and Discharge Summaries. I was holding on to my non-MT job for personal reasons, and I was not able to dedicate myself to being a full-time MT until this summer.

On September 15th, I started working full time for a national. My trainer kept telling me I was doing really well. The first day she told me instead of sending all my reports to me with edits and comments, she would only email them to me if there were major errors in them. I got a few emails that had client-specific formatting errors, and one or two that had medical errors in them, but overall it was a lot less correction than I had expected.

Anyway, after one week of training, my 1-week QA review was today. I scored a 98.8% and that allowed me to be taken off of 100% QA and moved into my regular team from the training team! It is scary that my work is not going to the editors for review unless I specify that it should, but it is quite a testament to the training I received. I do not know what the standard time is to accomplish >98%, but I am pretty sure it is typically greater than one week.

So, any of you thinking of signing up with a lower-cost program to save money, I would urge you to rethink that. Yes, it may be less up front, but you very well may have difficulty finding a job without any experience, and you may also have trouble keeping up once you are on production pay.

I realize that there are others who have been able to succeed without one of the two top-rated schools, but from what I see here, that seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

I hope this has not offended any; it is certainly not offered up in that spirit. I hope to encourage all the newbies out there- it CAN be done!

Sandi

edited for spelling

[ 09-22-2003: Message edited by: Sandi in Florida ]

Sandi