Physical Therapy Career Plan

Next year, I plan on attending Bethel College for Exercise Science. An Exercise Science degree could take me down multiple paths, but this past school year, I have narrowed it down. My plans were to become a Physical Therapist until a couple months ago I was introduced to Occupational Therapy. My recent meeting with my administrator helped me decide that I want to do Occupational Therapy because Physical Therapy is so popular that the schooling degree requires much more schooling than before. For Physical Therapy you need to earn a graduate degree which is usually a doctoral degree that takes around three years to complete. Which isn’t bad, but the demand for Physical Therapy is growing higher and higher and when I graduate in eight years,

There’s just something about it that captivates me. Seeing the way that people improve through any help, whether that be physical or mental. I love interacting with people and I love helping people and that is what has motivated me to choose this career. It was a very easy choice for me to make because I love helping people but I am not motivated enough to go through many years of schooling to become a doctor. I am very thankful for them, but I want a family outside of my career and I know that’s difficult to do with a career path like that. I also have no interest in being a nurse because I want semi-normal work hours and I know that hospital hours are crazy. I know that there are several other ways to help people, like being a teacher or a guidance counselor, but I think Occupational Therapy is the right career path for me. When I suggested this career path to my parents, they immediately agreed with me and thought that this was the perfect fit. Out of college, I do want the experience of working in a hospital, but from my own experience, Physical Therapists and Occupational Therapists have pretty normal hours in the hospital environment. I’ve wanted to be a therapist for a while now, but I kept changing what kind I wanted to be. One of the most important moments that helped to decide Occupational is when my mom’s childhood friend recently got hospitalized and paralyzed from a car accident. We were visiting him, and even though I had only met him once before, he was so positive about where he was and he was so accepting of his paralyzation. I was looking at the board that has all of his information on it, and he had an occupational therapist’s name written on his board, so I asked him about it. He told me that the physical and occupational therapists he had, pretty much did the same thing for him, so far in his recovery process. They just had different hours and came in at different times. He was very thankful for them