Top 5 Things Pre-Physical Therapy Students Should Focus on During Their Sophomore Year
In this post, you’ll find my advice for what Pre-PTs should focus on during their sophomore year of college. Keep in mind that not all Pre-PTs follow the “traditional” route to PT school, this list is only meant to be a guide relating to the years before applying to PT school. Shift this list to your journey as you need.
1. Maintain or attempt to increase their freshman-year GPA
As I mentioned in my “Top 5 Things Pre-Physical Therapy Students Should Focus on During Their Freshman Year” post, I mentioned that while providing your GPA with a solid foundation was important, it also isn’t the end of the world if your freshman year GPA is lower than what you want. This is the time to begin showing improvement. Use your sophomore year to really focus on increasing your GPA and keep in mind that your PT school prerequisites often have a separate GPA.
2. Begin tackling the easier PT school prerequisites
While freshman year was focused on taking general education classes, sophomore year should be the beginning of taking your PT school prerequisites. I would focus on the 2-4 classes that you feel will be easiest to complete and will increase or maintain your GPA. Do you excel in chemistry and biology? Take those and save physics and anatomy for junior year, that’s my motto at least.
3. Begin observing at 1-2 PT locations
This is when your observation of physical therapists should begin. Hopefully, you’ve determined what locations you want to observe and have contacted them about whether or not they are accepting volunteers. If you have time in your schedule, try to observe 1 therapist each semester in differing settings. Maybe observe a pediatric PT your first semester and an inpatient PT the second. The goal is to experience as many settings, therapists, and treatment styles as possible, but remember not to spread yourself too thin.
4. Get involved and peruse leadership positions within their extracurricular activities
Getting involved is a great way to demonstrate your ability to stick with an activity and adhere to it. It looks great to be a solid member of an organization for many years. However, it’s even better to showcase yourself as someone who can “climb the ranks” so to speak. Going for leadership positions within your extracurriculars is a great way to show this. You don’t need to be the president of every club you join, but showing that you are willing to dedicate your time and energy to a leadership role is telling.
This is probably the most optional piece of advice on this list. If perusing a leadership role is not something you are interested in, don’t force it. It will not make or break your application.
5. Begin to learn and really understand WHY they want to become a PT
For me, this part came a little later than my sophomore year in my journey. Mostly because I couldn’t observe until my junior year due to covid. But also because I didn’t decide to try and figure this out until I was forced to start thinking about application essays. It was during the second semester of my junior year that I realized I couldn’t answer this question quickly.
This bothered me because I was gearing up to apply to PT school and couldn’t list why I was passionate about it. From then on I made it my goal to write down everything that I loved about physical therapy as soon as I learned something new. My notes app got a lot of use in 2022, but once I finally applied I could list 15 unique, thought-out, and important reasons why physical therapy was important to me as a future career. So, what are your reasons for wanting to be a physical therapist?
For more insight into how I spent my sophomore year of college, check out my blog post: A Pre-Physical Therapy Student’s Timeline of Undergrad
I’d love to hear everyone’s reasons in the comments!
