Last Day :(

I can't believe it has been 10 weeks. Today was my last day at my first clinical! :( I think back about how scared I was with day one and how nervous I was to start and now I am so sad it's over. I feel like I learned SO MUCH from my CI and the clinic I was placed in was absoutely perfect for me! I would honestly recommend where I went to any of my classmates/students because it was that awesome. Everyone was great to work with and having the extra worker's compensation piece was super interesting. I feel like I definitely utilized my #1 lottery pick well without even really knowing it. (Thank God!)

It was hard to say goodbye to my patients, but I know they are in good hands. I will really miss them! So many wished me good luck at school and how I will be a great PT some day. It was so validating even though it was bittersweet. I know Monday will be hard when I am sitting in class and not treating patients.

I am so proud to say, "I did it!", though. :) Now, to keep the momentum going...

Halfway through ClinEd I!

I can't believe I am halfway through my first clinical! Time is flying. Yesterday and today were my official midterm reviews. Yesterday, my clinical director came to talk to me and my CI. I felt like my meeting went very well... other then I kept saying "like" a lot! It was nice to get some feedback and it is reassuring to know I am on the right track.

Today I had my official meeting with my CI, but we always talk back and forth so there weren't any surprises, thank goodness. I suppose I was a little surprised on my ratings because my CI is always very position so I felt like she rated me a little lower than what she says verbally. I asked her about it though and she said I was right where I needed to be, so I felt better. I think it's just the perfectionist in me that can't let it go. But, besides that, everything went well.

I can't wait to see how much I grow in the next five weeks, because I feel like I have learned so much already!

Did I really just finish my first week of my first clinical?!

I survived my first week! :) I am already really glad I chose the site I did because I can tell I am going to learn SO much. Every day I get new responsibilities, so it's been a nice transition. My CI is really great about reviewing things and teaching when we have the opportunity. I even got to teach her a special test for the shoulder that she didn't know about. I'm also getting great feedback at the end of every day. We are really working well together so far. My goals for this upcoming week are to continue treating patients who are already established, doing the documentation and starting to do some evaluations. I'm really excited to keep practicing what I've learned and really working on my skills. I've been surprised at the amount of crush injuries that I've seen, although thankfully no broken bones yet. I think it is going to be very interesting to be working in a clinic that is for worker's compensation. I'm also amazed at how acute some of the patients are- we get patients who come in only a couple HOURS post-injury! Pretty neat to see how quickly we can start with people.

First Day of my First Clinical

Today was my first day at my first clinical experience! I was so nervous I could barely eat my breakfast before I was out the door to start at 7am. I had met my CI briefly before so I had an idea of what my clinic looked like, which helped calm me down (although not by much). I'm very excited about my placement after my first day, so hopefully my first impression is right.

When I arrived my CI and another PT student (from a different school) were already there. I have since gained access to the code to come in the side door so I don't have to wait for the main doors to be unlocked. My CI greeted me and gave me a quick tour around the facility. I am interning at a clinic that is attached to a larger, urgent care setting. I got to meet the head physician and some other support staff along the way. My CI warned me that the day was going to be very busy so there wouldn't be much "us" time in the form of orienting and talking. Lucky for me my placement had an on boarding system full of information and paperwork that I had worked through before starting, so I feel like I got a great orientation through that and then the tour pretty much summed it up.

I spent most of my day observing, trying to get comfortable with how everything worked, but my CI kept me very involved with overseeing patients exercises and simple tx (hot packs, e-stim, etc).

During our quick lunch, my CI laid out some expectations she had of me and we had a little bit of time to chat, which was nice. Most of what she expected hasn't been anything I haven't at least heard of, so I felt really good about how my school has prepared me for this first experience.

My CI says she will be working with me to see what I know and then eventually I will get my own patients. That is scary but also exciting! As she would see pts throughout the day she would ask me questions about different muscles, special tests, goniometry landmarks, etc. I was able to answer just about all of the questions she asked me, so that was a good confidence booster.

My CI asked what joint I was most comfortable with, to which I feel I've been equally prepared for all of them, so she told me to review foot/ankle and knee for tomorrow. Yikes! I haven't looked at ankle/foot and knee since around May!!

I also got a little orientation and observed my CI using their electronic documentation system. It is pretty user friendly and I will get to put my hands on it to document pts and there is also some online training that I can do to help me orient myself to the system better. I'm very excited to work on my documentation skills.

So, that was pretty much my first day! I liked it! I have a lot to look at for tomorrow, but I can do it! :) I'm looking forward to the experience.

Where has the time gone?

The last time I posted it was in January!! It's July! I can't believe it. Time has been going by so quickly and obviously school has kept me really, really busy.

My spring semester ran from January-April and I had a large course load with my first PBL experience. It was a lot of work, but I really enjoyed my small group and I thought that we worked really well together and I learned a lot. I also had Neuroscience which was a big challenge, but it was really rewarding to understand everything (thank goodness we had our amazing physiology professor to teach us Neuro as well!). We also spent a lot of time in the lab learning all kinds of things like modalities and e-stim and a bunch of other things that I can't even think back far enough to remember!

Today I'm taking my last final of my third semester and the end of my first year. I can't believe it!! We took an 11 credit course all about musculoskeletal dysfunction. Needless to say, it was a LOT and I am so glad that I passed all my tests and have been deemed "ready" to go to my first clinical experience.

I'll talk more about that in another post, because I've got to get my study guide finished for my last final!

So THIS is what problem based learning is...

Well, I haven't really had a chance to sit down and write anything since I've started this semester because I am so busy. This semester is different than last semester; whether this is different good or bad I am not really sure. In some ways this semester makes last semester feel like a cakewalk, but then I think about my huge anatomy exams and life doesn't seem so bad.

This semester I was finally introduced (officially) to problem-based learning. I had learned how to teach inquiry-based learning (which is very similar... in fact without looking, I don't know what the difference[s] would even be) with my education degree, so I was interested to see how I liked it from a student perspective. It's... interesting. There are times when I really love it; I love the discussion and coming together to bounce ideas off of each other. The group that I am in has an almost perfect dynamic and word is that we are eons ahead of the other groups in terms of being able to accomplish what we are supposed to from these sessions. There are other times when I am not so sure... this is mostly when I am spending anywhere between 4-8 hours researching outside of class time and creating 10+ page word documents with tons of information. Then, after discussion, sometimes it's still a little iffy as to what I need to know vs "extra stuff" that I had found.

But, all in all, it's pretty good. We just had our first exam that correlated with our PBL sessions, lectures and labs. It was hard and easy at the same time. Mostly, I messed up on small details (like what does a T1 wave MRI show) and vocabulary that I tried to learn but got mixed up on when it came to the test. It will be interesting to see if I pass it or not. The nice thing about these tests is that if we don't pass them, we simply retake them. So, I already know from taking it what information I was supposed to know that I was iffy on, so I know what to look over if I do, in fact, need to retake it. Plus, it's just not worth having a mental breakdown over. Or that's what I'm trying to tell myself.

I am finding my clinical skills lab time easier; we are actually correlating all that boring, background information with real therapy, like modalities. That's been nice. We just started electrotherapy though, and it is intense. There is so much information. We are having 3 lectures on it and 2-3 lab sessions on it. I hope that I end up understanding it all... our professor told us we should plan to re-read our class notes/the chapter in the book at least 3 times.

Other than that, my other classes are not so bad. I am enjoying Neuroscience so far, although to be honest, we have not really covered too much of anything. Exercise physiology is really boring, but I am trying to be a really good student since I've never had an ex phys class before... The only other course I have is my 1 credit Correlative Neuro and it's almost as time consuming as PBL, even though it's not supposed to be since it's a 1 credit course.

I need to figure out how to be more efficient in my information gathering for both PBL and Correlative, because I am just spending so much time outside of school researching it's insane. I need to learn how to reel it in and try to stick to my objectives and not go "too far" into detail if I don't need to... right now it seems like I go too far when I'm not supposed to and not far enough for other things... I think as time goes on and we do more and more cases, I'll get better at balancing and figuring out what is exactly expected of me from the course.

So, with that, I am pretty much done studying for the night; I tried to work on some of my Correlative but J* is on his way home from Tampa, so I'm anxiously following him/his flights and also had to take a brain break from the 3 tests (and 1 quiz) I took this past week.

About to start Semester 2...

So, tomorrow I continue my journey in PT School and will start my second semester. Honestly, this two week break for Christmas has been GREAT. It was just long enough for me to get caught up on all of my personal life issues (minus seeing a couple of friends) and enough to recharge my batteries. I am happy to say that I am not dreading going to school tomorrow like I was before I started.

This semester will be interesting, I have the following courses:

Neuroscience (4)

Foundations of Movement Science I (7)

Fundamentals of Exercise Physiology (2)

Correlative Neuroscience (1)

For a grand total of 14 credits, as was my first semester. This semester will be my first semester with problem-based learning (PBL) and I'm excited. Coming from a background in education I am familiar with PBL and how to teach it, so I'm excited to use that particular knowledge to (hopefully) succeed with the course. It's a large amount of credits and I'm really just interested to see how this is all going to play out. The course is 7 credits, and it is all day Tuesday/Thursday. We have our PBL groups in the AM and then a lab portion in the afternoon. I have no clue what the lab portion is about, but I'm assuming it will be similar to my course in the Fall that was clinical skills 1.

In any case, I am trying to start this new year off with some changes; I am trying to remain positive although there has been a lot of stress surrounding me outside of school. I am thankful that although I had so many factors going against me in the first semester, I managed to pull through with good grades and am able to continue in this journey.

So, wish me luck! :)