Written by: Samantha Govitz, DPT18 and Joe Conaty, DPT18
As second years, we have just begun our last four-month semester of PT school! We have a short semester in the Spring, but that’s fine tuning and special topics, not a big academic lift. We started this rigorous Fall at the end of August and will conclude in early December, but not without a lot of diligent work. We have started our Terminal Projects which we will deliver in our ten-week semester that begins in January, just before we leave for our full time clinicals. We have also been given the responsibility to perform a needs assessment in the community where we can make an impact within the scope of physical therapy. That project is being conducted through our service learning course.
As we tackle the six classes we have this semester and the immense amount of information that we’ll continue to learn and build upon our foundational knowledge, we can look forward to April 2nd. On that day, we go off into the world to begin our first 4-month full time clinical as 3rd years! It sort of feels like a rite of passage as we will have concluded our didactic work and will have a greater role alongside our Clinical Instructor’s than we had as new 2nd years on our short part-time clinical.
The purpose of this series of clinicals is to properly prepare us to operate as “entry level” physiotherapists. That’s a diminutive title, but it means a lot. It’s not just we can independently identify patients who are safe and appropriate for physical therapy (and what to do if the patient is not,) what impairments she has, what treatments are available, the prognosis and a plan of care. And all the documentation accompanying that. Most of us can do a lot of that now; we’re good in the classroom and the labs, but we want to be great…no, excellent. By the end of clinical, it is reasonable to expect we do those things very fast and close to perfect, every time. Fast is the wrong word. We are expected to be fluent. We still have the big licensing exam, that we will all thoroughly prepare for. But the real measure is whether we can be competent in the profession. That’s what “entry level” means.
And let’s not kid around, everyone is looking forward to the clinicals.
Since the short clinical last January, we have gained a terrific amount of evaluative and treatment skills. It’s exciting! We’ve been practicing and reviewing, and practicing and reviewing. Everyone in the program is more-or-less healthy and independent. As a consequence, we’ve practiced all these new skills on essentially unimpaired, mature-but-not-aged, disease-free bodies. During clinicals we’ll get to apply our skills to people with impairments across all phases of the life span, which is an end in-and-of itself.
campbell dpt 