I had to complete an 8-credit internship for my Kinesiology coursework, and it was honestly one of the best experiences from my college career! I finally had the opportunity to put my work in the classroom into a clinical, practical setting. It was definitely intimidating because I had never done this before and wasn’t sure what to expect because I had never been to the facility or meet the staff before I showed up for my first day.
Completing this internship taught me a lot about physical therapy and refueled my fire for the career. I had so many great interactions and breakthroughs with patients, and it honestly made me feel like this is something that I could really do. Getting to the end of my undergraduate career and preparing for the next step of graduate school, I had a lot of doubts about my capabilities. I could really tell that my internship supervisor, along with the other staff, cared about me as a student, but more importantly, as a person. This really made the difference in my experience, and I really think I got lucky. I also felt super lucky to have the patients that I did! I got a lot of great advice from my supervisor as well, especially since she graduated from the DPT program that I will be attended.
A big part of my internship was doing a special project for my facility. I noticed pretty quickly that when completing their functional assessments, they estimated distances and didn’t have normative values established based on the setup. So for my special project, I essentially created a ”track” for the 6-minute walk test and placed markers for the timed-up-and-go test. The therapists all stated that it really helped them, but some of the patients weren’t so happy with me because now they had to go a bit further! The document for the guidelines and normatives is attached.