Annette Dickerson just wants to do things at a higher level.

After helping a surgeon staple a patient's stomach during an obesity-reducing procedure this week, Dickerson talked about her innate curiosity that led from a nursing career into one as a physician assistant.

"I kept wanting to go to the top and do more. I wanted to have the authority to order tests," and dig into why some patients didn't respond as expected to treatments, Dickerson said.

Her authority will gain a new dimension in August.

That's when Dickerson and 28 other graduates of the physician assistant program in Roanoke's Jefferson College of Health Sciences hold a "white coat ceremony," signifying they can order tests and X-rays and also do other doctorlike tasks such as diagnosing illnesses and prescribing medicines.

Jefferson College's physician assistant program is highly popular, and next year it will start offering a master's degree.

Students from all over the country are among the 400 applicants for Jefferson's next class of 30 candidates for bachelor's degrees, said Wilton Kennedy, director of Jefferson's PA program.

This year's class includes graduates from 13 states, one of them Washington, Kennedy said. More than 40 percent of graduates take jobs in Southwest Virginia, Kennedy said.

A physician assistant's starting pay can be as high as $70,000, but the work is rewarding in several ways. Money magazine rated the PA job among the 10 best in the country.

Job satisfaction is high, and most physician assistants say they'd enter the field again if they were making a career choice.

Only three other Virginia schools offer physician assistant degrees: Eastern Virginia Medical School, Shenandoah University in Winchester, and James Madison University. Those three already offer master's degrees.

Physician assistants' work in some ways parallels that of nurse practitioners. Both fields developed in the 1960s but nurse practitioners took off faster.

Both jobs are seen within the medical community as "physician extenders," a means of providing health care to more people, Kennedy said.

People are more likely to encounter nurse practitioners in a family practice or women's health center. Physician assistants are more likely to work with doctors who specialize in a particular field.

Kennedy said the typical Jefferson College PA applicant is 27 years old and has worked in a medicine-related field such as nursing or as a technician in radiology, pharmacy or emergency medicine. Many candidates already have a bachelor's degree in another field.

The physician assistant program is an abbreviated form of medical school, with classes in gross anatomy, neurology, pharmacology and diagnosis.

Their on-the-job clinical training includes one- or two-month stints in internal medicine, family practice, psychiatry, women's health, pediatrics, orthopedics, emergency medicine and general surgery, Kennedy said.

Community medicine is another part of the PA training, and it places students in Giles, Franklin and Smyth counties to work with local health agencies to inform the public about ways to manage their problems with chronic diseases such as diabetes, arthritis and congestive heart failure.

Dickerson said the bachelor's degree she is earning from Jefferson College will be her second. She already had a bachelor's degree in nursing, earned through Old Dominion University.

Dickerson doesn't plan to stop her education there, even though as a single mother she's raising three children while working weekends.

She plans to start work Sept. 4 in Carilion Clinic's general surgery department and continue working toward a master's degree.

That degree can be earned online through the University of Nebraska, Dickerson said.

Then, she'd like to return to Jefferson College to work with students and serve as a mentor,and as a guest lecturer who teaches surgery.

"I just want to be able to give back, to teach them what they need to know," Dickerson said.