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To become a physical therapist, you need to go to the proper school. First of all, you
need to get the prerequisites that the schools require, and that's usually chemistry, anatomy,
physics, some bio-mechanical type classes--kinesiology. And other than that, the schools want to just
make sure you have your bachelor's degree to start with, even a master's, but you have
to have those prerequisites that they require on their application. Also, it's good to have
experience from working in clinics as an aid or a technician, or even volunteer hours,
and you can do volunteer hours or aid hours in a hospital, in an out patient clinic. You
can do it with home help physical therapy. There are a lot of different aspects. A lot
of the schools like to see that you have had some acute care experience, meaning working
in the hospitals. Technical skills in becoming a physical therapist usually come as you're
in school to become the therapist. The hands on experience, and so you're not going to
get a lot of that as you're doing the work experience, or you're doing the volunteer
work to be able to go to physical therapy school. Going back to going into physical
therapy school. You have to apply to an accredited physical therapy school. Here in the state
of Utah, there is only one of those and that's at the University of Utah. I went to a school
in Texas, and they were transitioning between a master's degree to a doctorate degree, and
at the time I was there I received my master's degree. So there are various physical therapy
schools all over the United States. You just need to find out which school is accredited,
and that is the important thing. Personal skills you need as a physical therapist is
you have to be people friendly, and a people person. Be able to talk with them. And first
of all you need to make them feel comfortable as they come in, because most patients are
a little sore, or are complaining of pain, and I don't know about you, but if you have
an injury, then sometimes you can be a little ornery. So you need to know how to work with
those people. You have to have good hands on skills. Know how to hold the body part
that you're working correctly so you don't cause more injury. You need to have multi-tasking
skills, because a lot of times the way that the insurances are making it so reimbursement
rates are lower, we have to have more patients, and to be able to have more patients you've
got to bring a lot of patients in--therefore, you've got to be able to juggle patients,
and do certain things with patients at one time and then go to another patient, and maybe
come back to another patient. Where to go from here with your career. As you start out
as a therapist, you'd start out as a staff therapist, and then from there, depending
on your situation and where you're at, you can become a director of a clinic, director
of a hospital. You can become an owner of a physical therapy practice. And so there
are different ways to expound there. I also know a few therapists that have gone from
owners of clinics or directors of clinics, and they have started doing other forms of
physical therapy using their degree in ultrasound, ultrasonography, and diagnosing and helping
give those reports to doctors for various exercises--or, sorry, injuries. And so there
are a lot of different aspects you can go into with physical therapy.