This week I’m on vacation from classes, but don’t think that means I’m sitting around doing nothing all week!
Have I mentioned before how much is involved with my 5 year plan to go back to school?!? It’s crazy! I know I wrote last week about being back in school, but aside from all the pre-requisite classes I also need to take the GRE’s, get references, and do 50-100 hours of observation time in different physical therapy settings – so, I figured this week off would be the perfect time to start some of those observation hours!
While I am pretty sure I know what type of physical therapy I am interested in, I figure this is a good time to try to see all the different types physical therapy settings. To name a few, there are:
- Inpatient at a hospital (acute and sub-acute)
- Outpatient Rehabilitation
- Extended Care / Nursing Home
- Schools
- Home Healthcare
- Sports/ Wellness / Fitness
Any guesses as to which I’m most interested in?? : )
Yup, Sports & Wellness is where I’m looking to go! This week though, I’m actually spending my time at an inpatient rehabilitation hospital, and while I don’t think it’s necessarily something I’m interested in doing, the work they do there really is amazing – I got to see stuff like stroke and brain injury patients re-learning basic tasks and amputees taking their first steps…
One of the reasons that I decided to observe at this particular hospital was because at one of my old jobs I was actually very involved with planning a major fundraising event to benefit this facility called Tip-a-Player (you know, way back when I worked in fundraising and event planning!). It was great, we would convert the arena floor into a restaurant and all of the hockey players would act as servers and do different silly things to raise “tips” (donations) from the attendees, we raised over $60,000 each year!
It was nice to see where all the money we had raised went to and I actually got to see a lot of the people that used to come and volunteer at the event!
I’ll be at the rehab hospital for the rest of this week and I’m working on setting up some observation time at a really great sports performance and sports medicine facility for my next school break, so hopefully I’ll find exactly what I’m looking for and that’ll just reinforce this crazy decision to go back to school for 5 years!
P.S. while I was looking for the picture above I came across some fun pictures
of all the crazy things I got to do at my old jobs…here’s one of my favorites:
What?? You never fed elephants brunch in the middle of a city??!?
Live, Run, Grow 
It’s cool that you get to spend time in different environments before diving into the program. What kinds of settings would you get to work in doing sports and wellness?
There are a decent amount of out patient orthopedic settings that are primarily focused on working with more active clients, whether it be casual runners or athletes or someone coming back from an injury and wanting to return to an active lifestyle. I’ve also seen a few gyms that have PT’s renting out space and working right at the gym which is interesting too.
Sounds like a great opportunity! Kudos on taking such great steps to pursue your dreams!
Thanks! It’s a lot of work and a lot of school, but I think once I get there I’ll really enjoy it!
Hilarious!! I love the elephants! That must have been crazy. But being able to observe PT in different settings would be really neat – and probably help solidify where you want to focus.
Yes, I’m pretty confident in that I know I want to work in a more athlete/ fitness based setting, but I’m sure I’m going to have to do a bit of everything during school so it’s good to see them all!
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