I attended the Medical Administrative Assistant program in 2004. I should have known something was fishy when I took their 'entrance exam', which consisted of some 2nd grade math and asking you to identify simple pictures. But I was young and naive and excited about "getting a degree in as little as 8 months!" Bah.
The class was unstructured and the instructor was unprofessional. The first half of the evening was spent in a computer lab, and the second half in a classroom type setting.in the computer lab, you could work at your own pace and work ahead if you wanted. It took me about 2 weeks to finish a Module (a month) of work. The rest of the time was spent sitting there, because our instructor told us there was nothing more I needed to be doing.
In the classroom, we went through a text book and had tests at the end of the week. But usually students would whine "I didn't study! I need more time!" and the teacher would appease them by giving them more time (therefore holding up the rest of the class) and/or giving them answers right before the test. A lot of the answer keys were also incorrect and I would have to go through the text book myself to show where the correct answer was located because I was getting pissed off getting right answers marked as wrong.
The CPR training was a joke, as most of the training consisted of listening to the instructor talk about her personal life, a video on CPR, a quick glance to see if you were doing things "basically right" on a dummy, and a simple written test.
5 months into the program, our instructor quit/was fired unexpectedly. (School admin says she was fired, the instructor said she quit.) Come to find out that all that time spent there with "nothing more to do", was a lie. All of the more important books (CPT coding, ICD-9, and Medical Terminology) had never been touched, and we as students just assumed we would get to them in a future module. No. Those were supposed to be self-study. Our instructor never told us that. Which meant that, in order to graduate, I had 4 more months to catch up on 5 previous months of work, in addition to the current stuff. Try teaching yourself how to use coding books. And filling out insurance forms. It is next to impossible. And yet, knowledge in those areas are the things that most employers look for in a competent MAA.instead, the text books we covered in class were things like how an office is run, what the different people in an office do, etc.
When it came time to do an internship, that was a joke as well. I spent a month at a mental health clinic. Doing file work. Pulling files out of file cabinets. Using a 3-hole punch so I could put papers into files. And then putting the files back into the file cabinet. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I went to 'college' so that I could train for that!
Come to find out, most doctor/medical offices will not accept interns from Olympia because of their poor reputation. Which also means that they will not hire Olympia graduates, either. Two of the major local hospitals and their affiliates will throw your resume in the garbage if they see OTCI listed. My own OB/GYN told me this.
So don't waste your money or your time at this 'school'. Nothing will come from it except an exorbitant student loan payment. Take the extra time to go to a REAL college.
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