Interested in physical therapy school...what should I do?

Graduate School
1

Hello!
I am currently a 20-year-old junior at Texas A&M. I will be starting my senior year in the fall and have decided that I want to go into physical therapy. When I started college in Fall 2014 I had my mind set on becoming a pharmacist. My grades were great the first two years but they took a turn for the worse my junior year. I majored in Allied Health but my struggles with chemistry and precalculus this past academic year has resulted in my transcript having several bad marks. I also rethought my career plans.

I took General Chemistry 2 and Precalculus in Fall 2016. I made a D in Chemistry lecture, a C in the lab, and I dropped Precalculus.
In the Spring 2017 semester, I decided to retake General Chemistry 2 along with General Biology pt.2 and ended up having to drop both classes because I failed the first 2 exams.
I also took statistics and made a C :frowning:
I lost my cashier job of 2 years that semester as well.

To make matters worse, I changed my major to Psychology last summer and that ended up throwing off my graduation date. But I’m set to graduate in December 2018 and am majoring in Allied Health again. I have developed a passion for fitness and health over the last year and feel like physical therapy would be a career that I could excel in.

I have made A’s and B’s in the other prerequisite courses (anatomy & physiology, general biology 1, psychology) but the fact that there are 3 Q-drops and a D on my transcript from the 2016-2017 school year makes me feel that I won’t have a shot at physical therapy school after finishing undergrad. I also have 0 shadowing/volunteering hours.I will be taking physics 1 and 2 this upcoming academic year, and general biology 2 next summer but need to rack up volunteer hours ASAP. How do I go about doing this?

Should I take a gap year to retake classes and strengthen my application?
If not, what should I do within the next year and a half to be adequately prepared to apply for PT schools next summer?

2

You will likely have to take at least one gap year. Maybe more.

Every DPT program I’ve ever looked at - and I looked at a lot, because my sister was interested in getting one - has required a certain number of PT-related shadowing/volunteer hours and a recommendation letter from a PT or an OT. University of Washington, for example, requires 50 - and that generally seems like a modal number for many programs. Others require more - USC requires 150 hours; University of Puget Sound and Northwestern require 100.

Even if there are a few programs that do not require any hours, because most programs do I would imagine that the majority of competitive candidates have some hours. And, because DPT admissions are competitive, I would imagine that most competitive candidates actually have more than the minimum number of hours required.

Also, most DPT classes I’ve seen require candidates to have a minimum number of the prerequisites completed before admitting students, usually half. I’m using UW as an example again - they require two semesters of chemistry, two semesters of biology, one behavioral science, one statistics, two semesters of physics and two semesters of A&P. It looks like you are missing at least semester each of chemistry and biology and the two semesters of physics. So you have more than half, but only barely, which doesn’t make you a very competitive candidate - especially if you have Cs and Ds in some prerequisite courses.

In addition, many (most?) DPT programs require a grade of at least a C in each prerequisite course. Unless you retook chemistry 2 and didn’t mention it, you don’t have a C in that class. Did you ever retake biology? Most also require a science/prerequisite GPA of a 3.0. What is yours?

I once chatted with a DPT student I met in the waiting room of the student health clinic at Columbia. I was curious about her path, since - as I said - my sister wanted to get a DPT at the time. She told me that she had gotten her bachelor’s in biology, and immediately thereafter she had gone to school to become a physical therapist’s assistant. She worked as a PTA for a few years before applying to DPT school. She told me that many of her classmates had taken the same route So that’s one way that DPT students get the experience, albeit this is a long path.

Another way you can do this is by volunteering at a hospital or clinic, working closely with an OT or PT to get direct hours. Some hospitals and clinics have formal volunteer programs for hopeful pre-health students, but you can also just find an interesting clinic or ward and ask someone!