5 Things to Expect During Your First Semester of PT School
One week ago I completed my first semester of PT school at Texas Woman’s University! These past few months have been exciting, stressful, adventurous, and incredibly eye opening. Here are some things that I learned or became aware of during these past 4 months that I think would help future PT students prepare for school!
1. A sleep schedule is absolutely crucial!
As someone who finished this semester without a sleep schedule of any kind, this is clearly something on my “need to do” list.
I was the kind of person that had the most random sleep schedule during undergrad and it worked for me. This all changed when PT school started and let me tell you, it was an eye opener. Suddenly having a 8-5 “job”, really puts into perspective how important it is to get as much sleep as you can. You will spend the entire day needing every bit of energy that you gained the night before.
Fatigue is something that I experienced pretty frequently, and the only reason why it didn’t really hinder my performance was because of my good friend caffeine. While I did manage to escape this semester without a caffeine addiction, if I don’t change my sleeping habits now I cannot say the same for the rest of my time in PT school.
Sleep is incredibly important for people like us who are constantly trying to take in new information and learn it. PT school is not about memorization, it’s learning the information that you will need for the rest of your career. Not getting enough sleep means that those ideas and concepts do not solidify in your brain. That’s only going to hinder you in the long term.
2. It’s not necessarily hard, but it’s a lot
Now this opinion is 100% dependent on what program you’re in, what professors you have, the way you learn/study, and how much prior knowledge you had before coming into PT school.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the concepts we were being taught were not hard to conceptualize. Not in the same way that a class like physics was hard for me during undergrad. For the most part, the concepts themselves were pretty straightforward. I desperately hope that that continues for the next 2 1/2 years.
The difficulty comes in with the sheer amount of information given to you on a daily basis. At the end of each week, we had been introduced to about 500 slides worth of information. This was all done while juggling each individual class, studying for tests, and prioritizing some classes over others. All while maintaining our lives outside of school. This can get overwhelming at times.
3. Time Management (and not just for your classes)
If there are 24 hours in a day, 12 of them are spent either: at school (8am-5pm), getting ready for school (6-7am), or commuting to and from school. 8 of them (on a good day) are spent sleeping, and the leftover 4 must be divided amongst winding down, studying, working out, cooking, eating, and getting ready for bed. Again, this could be program specific, but from what I’ve seen it’s pretty close to the norm. Finding balance is the key and I’ll be honest…I haven’t found it yet, but here’s to semester #2!
4. Know Your Limits (Self-Care is your friend)
Understanding when you’ve reached your limit is incredibly important. Burnout is real and has very real mental and physical consequences that can be a detriment to your life, especially if your life revolves around Graduate School. Know when to say no, when to stop studying, and when to go out and have fun. School will always be waiting for you, and I have yet to regret a mental break that I’ve taken.
For example, this semester my Wednesdays were quite stressful. Wednesdays for us included two of our hardest classes back-to-back from 8 to 12. I knew that on Wednesdays during my lunch break I was not doing anything related to school. My brain was often overloaded and I was very close to becoming stressed out. Instead, I would go off campus, get myself a coffee, eat my lunch in an empty classroom and watch two hours of the great British Baking Show. It was a reset for my mind, and it allowed me to be ready for the rest of the day. Learn what brings you peace and relaxes you. Seek out opportunities to do those things occasionally, but especially when you know that you are prone to stress. Breaks save lives.
5. Making friends is important
I will be the first to admit that I can be a touch anti-social at times, however, I thankfully understood the importance of making friends early on so that we could lean on each other for the next 2 1/2 years.
Is a lot of our bonding complaining about our assignments and stressing about upcoming exams together? Absolutely, but it’s also having friends to talk to who are going through the exact same experiences that you are now. It’s having a multitude of diverse people to help you learn and see things from different perspectives. It’s learning what loving the profession of physical therapy looks like for different people.
Thank you for following me on my path as a future DPT, leave a comment if you have any questions about my time in PT school and I wish you all luck on your own journeys!! For those of you who think you might be interested in Physical Therapy check out my blog post: Top 12 Physical Therapy Observation Locations.
