Soooooooooooo what’s new? Anything happening…..like, globally?
Could it be….a worldwide pandemic?!!
It turns out, little beknownst to us student folk, that March 13 was our last day of classes. We didn’t see it coming. And as a Floridian, I am used to the slow, excruciating approach of a hurricane. I am not used to sudden virus tornadoes that come sweepin through the plain and turn my life, and myself, upside down.
So needless to say, the ending of our didactic curriculum of PT school was a little…anti-climactic. The last day at school was a Friday, and we were actually at a local children’s hospital where we had been having Peds class. We left, my friend and I went to Tropical Smoothie, I frantically ran to Aldi to buy groceries before the apocalypse, and then I went home. It didn’t even occur to me until the following week that that was it for classes.
How did/is our school handling it?
For the rest of spring semester we finished up school online through Zoom. One of our classes was supposed to be basically a lab entirely focused on manual therapy. That switched to doing case studies as a class through Zoom. I personally didn’t feel that it was as good as if we had been in class, but we made the best of the situation. Hopefully we will be able to meet at some point in the future to make up some of the hands-on component, but that doesn’t look very likely, since FIU is online through summer semester.
Our peds class was also through Zoom. For the lab component of that class, we were actually doing the exercises ourselves in class, and trying to make them as fun as possible. So it’s super sad we didn’t get to finish that class because it was so. fun. The lecture component was more or less the same through Zoom.
And our other class was Dimensions of Professional Practice, which also translates pretty well to online, since it is mostly lectures.
Still, there’s something about just being in class, listening to your professor talk, able to ask questions, being forced to focus and not look at Reddit for the zillionth time…..
I am soooo thankful that I was able to finish my 3rd internship since I was in Spring A for internship. I finished it in February, so that one is in the bank.
Half of my class was on their internship when the quarantine started, since they were in Spring B. So they are missing some weeks in their internship. Most of those students in Spring B internship will be making up extra weeks during our summer internship. Luckily, my school already normally does more weeks of internship than is required (we do 36 weeks and only 30 weeks are required). Also! CAPTE reduced the number of hours required due to the quarantined, down to 28. So basically now the requirement 8 weeks less than we would normally do.
Yes, our school does a summer internship and then we graduate in August. We were supposed to start this internship on May 11, but of course that is not happening. Our internship is currently scheduled to start on June 22, 2020 and mine will last until the end of July. The students who have to do more weeks will be ending later.
Since our school graduates in August, we normally take the boards at the next board date, which is in late October. So most likely that will be going according to plan.
So all in all, as of right now, it’s not really affecting the overall timeline in terms of graduation and taking the boards, which I am so so so so grateful for.
And at the moment we are at the start of 2 months off between the end of classes and our summer internship. So we have tons of time to study for boards, and I’m currently procrastinating by writing to you, soooooooooooo, let me get back to it 🙂