One of the most frequent questions that pre-PT students have is
CAN I WORK IN PT SCHOOL??
And it’s totally understandable, PT school is money-hungry bae and you need to live and eat and buy margaritas!
So to answer your question, can you work in PT school, my answer is this:
YESSSSSSSS!
If you love Stefan like I do, you can totally work in PT school. If you don’t we have bigger problems to talk about.
***By the way, all of the following is just my opinion and you should totally do whatever you want. Don’t even listen to me.***
My opinion is this: you can totally 100% definitely without a doubt work in PT school.
If the question is SHOULD you work in PT school? My answer is also 100% yes definitely indubitably YES DO IT DO IT NOW (I mean, do whatever you want, who am I?). Why? Because loans. And there is no hero coming to save you at the end of the day. And the best way to minimize the amount of money you have to pay off, is to minimize the amount of money you borrow. And the best way to do that is to be related to a Baldwin brother. But failing that, the second best way to make money is to werk hunny. Like Mariah Carey says, the hero lies in YOU. You can do this!
The more important question is….how much can you work in PT school? And to that my answer is:
To answer this question, it totally depends on each and every student. Every situation is different. Some people can easily handle multiple roles, many different hours doing various things, keeping track of various tasks, etc. More power to them! Other people are more single track and can’t juggle multiple responsibilities. That’s fine, but take it with a giant caveat: your loans will probably be much higher.
But, like I said, every situation is different. You might have parents supporting you, or a spouse. You might have passive income from a massive stock portfolio. You might be semi-internet famous. I’ve known PT students in each of these categories! In these cases, you should be just fine not working, or working very minimally. However, this is not the case with the majority of students.
If you are a bright young multitasking go-getter like Spongebob here, work to your heart’s content. If you have serious issues with focusing on just one thing and love the thrill of having too much to do, all the time, work!
Me personally, I definitely fit into this category. I’ve always been the type to have jobs, and backup jobs, and more backup jobs. That’s just how I am.
I also fit into the category of people who don’t like owing money. Luckily, these things go hand in hand in Spongebob hand. I work a ton in PT school, and it is a little stressful and sometimes takes away from my studies, but on the whole, I am so glad that I have worked my squarebutt off these 3 years.
I go super in detail into my work life here and money life here, so check them out! In total I probably work maybe 25 hours a week? So with 15 hours of class a week, and about 30 hours of studying that gets to be a little much. And when we’re on internship we’re doing 40 hours in the clinic, another 5-10 studying a week (at least I do) and I probably work 15 hours a week during internship.
But in this article I also want to talk about some of the jobs my classmates have. Almost all of us work to some degree to get our degree 🙂
Many of my classmates are personal trainers like I am at FIU gym, or some work at other gyms. Some do things like babysitting. Some do promo gigs on the weekends for brands. Some already have their PTA licenses and work as PTAs in clinics. Some work as PT techs in clinics. Some do online work like administrative stuff, or digital media type of stuff. One works at a grocery store. And maybe about 25% don’t work at all.
I have heard of PT schools who don’t allow work. I would never ever ever ever go to such a school. This to me demonstrates such a lack of respect for students. It basically says, we don’t trust you to know how much you can deal with, we don’t care how many loans you have to take out, and we don’t care that the debt-to-income ratio for a PT really doesn’t justify this. The onnnlllyyy way mayyyybbeee that I could understand such a scenario is with an accelerated program where you finish in 2 years. In that case, the time out of work supporting yourself is less, so maybe you might have less personal loans you need to take out during this time. Plus, of course, the schoolwork is more condensed so it kind of make sense. Even so, I still probably wouldn’t go for it. I like to work. I would never accept anyone telling me I can’t, especially not the very same school that is simultaneously taking all of my money. I need to have my independence and ability to make my own income, just like Yonce.
