If you are interested in becoming a medical assistant, you must receive certification in order to do this. You can get your certification at most vocational schools and generally takes about one year to complete. There are also many medical assistant schools geared specifically for this specialty in your area. Checking your yellow pages or the hospital bulletin board may be a good place to start to see if there is a school in your area. If you are only interested in the behind the scenes portion of medical assisting, only one year of schooling is required. This will entitle you to do bookkeeping, schedule appointments and do other various paperwork regarding patients. For a closer interaction with the patient’s, you will be required to receive more training. Generally this training can be done with an associate’s 2-year degree though a community college and will entitle you the ability to draw blood and give injections to patients as well as record their vital statistics before the doctor comes in to examine the patient. These vital records include checking the patient’s weight, height and blood pressure.