Forward
I am a Health Sciences major in the College of Allied Health, the track I am on is pre-physical therapy as well as pre-medicine. This project was designed to give me the opportunity to volunteer in the OrthoNeuro physical therapy office. Volunteer hours are required for all physical therapy graduate programs, this means that along with earning quite a few hours towards that, I was able to observe what therapists do on a day to day basis as a way to see if I would enjoy the work that they do.
When I came to UC at the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year, I was pretty certain that I wanted to practice physical therapy after having gone through it several times for sports during high school. My peer leader, however, gave me great advice that I am extremely glad that I followed. She suggested to our learning community that we consider switching our track in health sciences to the pre-medicine track if we were at all doubting that we may want to go another route. This turned out to be the force that made me consider medical school as an option. I followed her advice and switched tracks so that in the event that I did want to go to medical school, I would have already taken all of the prerequisites for it.
But now I have a dilemma! I have gone from being certain about my career choice to where I am now, with my mind not made up and decisions to make! This project is meant to help me decide of I enjoy what physical therapists do on a day to day basis. I believe in trying something before committing and this shadowing experience will be my way to "try" out physical therapy. This coming summer I hope to go through a similar process of shadowing physicians of different specialties so that I can look into what interests me in medicine. For now however, this experience will stand alone and help me decide how interested I really am in becoming a physical therapist.
On the following pages I have included the proposal in its entirety and an article that I wrote concerning ankle injury and the effects of bracing. You will also find the 14 entries of the audio blog I created to reflect on my experiences, one for each day that I volunteered! Thank you for taking the time to look around, I hope that my audio blog may be an example that you can use to supplement your own reflection!
Sincerely,
Charles McCombs
When I came to UC at the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year, I was pretty certain that I wanted to practice physical therapy after having gone through it several times for sports during high school. My peer leader, however, gave me great advice that I am extremely glad that I followed. She suggested to our learning community that we consider switching our track in health sciences to the pre-medicine track if we were at all doubting that we may want to go another route. This turned out to be the force that made me consider medical school as an option. I followed her advice and switched tracks so that in the event that I did want to go to medical school, I would have already taken all of the prerequisites for it.
But now I have a dilemma! I have gone from being certain about my career choice to where I am now, with my mind not made up and decisions to make! This project is meant to help me decide of I enjoy what physical therapists do on a day to day basis. I believe in trying something before committing and this shadowing experience will be my way to "try" out physical therapy. This coming summer I hope to go through a similar process of shadowing physicians of different specialties so that I can look into what interests me in medicine. For now however, this experience will stand alone and help me decide how interested I really am in becoming a physical therapist.
On the following pages I have included the proposal in its entirety and an article that I wrote concerning ankle injury and the effects of bracing. You will also find the 14 entries of the audio blog I created to reflect on my experiences, one for each day that I volunteered! Thank you for taking the time to look around, I hope that my audio blog may be an example that you can use to supplement your own reflection!
Sincerely,
Charles McCombs