Goals and Learning

Career Goals

My career goal is to become a physical therapist. I have yet to

decide a specialty, but I am particularly interested in neurologic

rehabilitation and acute inpatient at this point. This career goal

includes going into a doctorate program where I will spend three

years earning my degree before taking an exam to earn my

license to practice. I have this goal for several reasons. As a child,

I knew I wanted to go into the medical field because of my love for biological sciences. This idea took me down many paths, but I ultimately ended up deciding on physical therapy because of many reasons.

A few of the key factors in making this decision were the influence of my mom's career of a massage therapist at the time, my involvement in sports and biomedical clubs, and my experiences with injury in myself and others around me. Witnessing the impact that my mom was able to have on peoples' lives just through muscle manipulation was a major influence on my desire to learn how to help people heal their bodies with less invasive methods. Sports exposed me to lots of injuries and the concept of exercise and rest to prevent them. I participated in HOSA and learned about the profession of physical therapy and some of the basic skills that are incorporated into the daily activities of a physical therapist, which pushed me even further to certainty about my career goal in high school. My experiences with injury never lead me to physical therapy, although it would've been beneficial to me at the time. Seeing many of my friends and family members struggle with an injury or chronic problem, start PT, and a few weeks later feel so much better was a really big motivator for me as well.

Oftentimes people have one experience like an injury that leads them to a career choice of PT, but my many factors have helped me to reach the same conclusion and feel very secure in my decision to pursue this career.

Physical therapists have a multitude of skills, and pursing this career requires that I build up my own skillsets. A large part of my decision to participate in LHSI was to determine if research is something that I want to pursue alongside my DPT. Another part of it was to build my skills to help me reach my goals.

I have made significant progress towards my goals in my internship this academic year. Being involved in research has helped me to improve many valuable skills and learn a lot about possibilities after an undergraduate degree. I have reaffirmed my choice of career path, and discovered the intricacies of pursing a PhD which has allowed me to consider further if it is something I want to do along with PT school or not. I have grown in my scientific knowledge, my understanding of the research process, and my skills that are transferable to other areas of my life. This summer I will be traveling mostly, but the following semester I will be in an internship to see another area of physical therapy that I am less familiar. This will allow me to be more knowledgeable about the field I am going into and gain more diverse experiences.

Internship Goals

Learning Goal #1: In this internship, I want to gain confidence in working independently as a part of team while balancing knowing when to ask questions and when to trust myself and what I have learned so far.

Relevance: This goal helps me to prepare for my future because it allows me to gain independence that I will need as a professional. I will allow me to find the balance between independence and working as a part of a team that I will need in my continuing academic and professional careers. I've found that I often look for validation of my work even when I know it's okay because I don't trust myself to make that call. Working on this will help me to be a better student and employee.

Action Plan:

Practice with knowing when to ask questions (ask about anything to do with subjects, but judgment call in most cases).
Utilize graduate students when asking questions. I’ll have to make the call on who to ask what and when.
I will do activities that range from independent to more complex. I’ll be able to take initiative to learn skills I can be independent in eventually

Progress: Throughout my internship, most of the work I did was pretty independent, which required me to work on this goal a lot. I regularly made decisions about what questions I could figure out for myself and what I should ask about. I had to think about who could answer my questions and what I could do in the meantime until my question was answered. I had a harder time with this at the beginning of the internship when things were newer and unfamiliar, but after a little while I started to pick up trends and it was easier to decide what and when I should ask questions. Most of the examples of this were when I was doing work with data organization or literature reviews, work that can be pretty independent but the tasks at hand required some specific guidance. I will continue to work on this goal as I improve my confidence in my abilities in the things I do. My goal remains the same, to know when to trust myself and when I need to ask questions.

Learning Goal #2: I want to grow in my ability to confront challenges and failures by allowing myself to
learn from them and not being too hard on myself with minor mistakes

Relevance: This goal prepares me for the future because I will inevitably face challenges and failures as I proceed
with my education and career. Being able to accept my mistakes and learn from them will help me to be
a better professional.

Action Plan:

I will be in an environment where failure allows growth and others are there to help when needed.
With recruitment calls, I’ll get a lot of rejection and shouldn’t take that personally.
I’ll learn to constantly be working on projects where some things will work out and some things won’t. “Treat it like a struggling actor” (example: grants)

Progress: I have made a lot of progress on this front. I had many challenges throughout my internship with trying to understand concepts that were mostly above my level of knowledge. Literature reviews were one the the things that were the most challenging but most beneficial. I had to spend a lot of time reading articles and rereading to attempt to understand what I needed from them. It took a lot of time and focus, but I had to be patient with myself and learn from the experience rather than be frustrated that it wasn't something naturally easy to me. I also failed in some of this stuff as I realized I hadn't done as much or exactly what was needed, so I had to adjust and continue to learn. This experience helped me to shift my mindset and be more accepting that I can't be good at everything very quickly. I will continue to improve upon this goal as I face challenges in my internship next semester and schooling/career following that.

Learning Goal #3: I want to improve my transferable skills to prepare me for graduate school, some of
which are communication, teamwork, creative thinking, and time management.

Relevance: These skills help to make me a better student, professional, and more well rounded applicant when it
comes to graduate school. All of these skills are key in most areas of my life, and improving them will be
helpful.

Action Plan:

Time management: The position has flexible hours and varying needs based on when participants are available. I will have to work on scheduling constantly and change my management based on the week.
Communication: I will communicate with my team about my priorities and if too much is on my plate or if there is something I don’t understand.
Teamwork: All of the projects are team efforts, so I will be able to practice collaboration with people on all different levels of academia.

Progress: I have made significant progress in this goal as well. All of these skills I used weekly in my internship. I was able to improve my time management by figuring out how to balance this internship and school, which was a struggle at first but got easier as I worked on it. I improved my communication through my experience with doing literature reviews and making presentations, both of which required me to learn new terminology and find ways to explain things. In the lab we worked as a team on several projects, and overall the whole experience was collaborative which I am grateful for. I will continue to work on these skills in the rest of my time in undergrad and even as I continue into graduate school and my career.

Learning

Some skills that I am more confident on already are communication, my ability to confront challenges and failures, my ability to take constructive criticism and feedback, independence, and teamwork. I know I am growing in these skills because I am using them regularly in my work, and find myself more comfortable in what I am doing. For example, a big part of my job is working on recruitment, and through this I make a lot of phone calls and even present to classes. Both of those tasks are things that would've been very uncomfortable to me previously, but now I am able to do them with very minimal stress.

Some skills I would like to continue working on are time management and problem solving. I find that since my work is often very flexible, it can be difficult to set aside blocks of time while I am at home to work. I haven't had a lot of opportunities to problem solve in my work, but when I have I've enjoyed it and found it a valuable time expenditure. I would like to continue improving that skill by working on literature reviews and data organization, so I can do some more puzzle-like tasks.

The internship has helped me to gain a deeper understanding of my coursework because I have been able to see the applied side of what I have learned about. For example, I learned about delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) my freshman year, and am not on a study that is researching it. Seeing real life applications of concepts like these make it much more fun to learn.