Halfway Through My DPT!

"How do you think you did?"
Me: "Well... uh...I mean, I guess it could use some improvement."

This is the conversation that goes on every time after a competency at school. In case you don't know what a competency entails, it's this: It's essentially an exam done with a professor and/or PT clinician where you perform your PT skills and receive a grade. A number of things can allow you to fail. If you fail more than two times, you get kicked out of the program.
Competencies have been beasts for me ever since I started school. My first year, I floundered and failed nearly every single time it seemed. I had retakes. And I had second retakes. And I had to take retakes over break. PT school seemed like one huge, stupid, massive struggle and I sucked at it. Competencies would go like this:
Professor: "How do you think you did?"
Me: "Well, I think I did ok."
Professor: "Actually, no. You messed up. I want you to retake."

After a couple times of that, I stopped saying I did good or even ok during the feedback session.

Was I ever going to be a good PT? Come summer, I had the ante upped for me a bit as I got a talking to about my awful competency performances. It always seemed like it was some stupid mistake that got me in the end: Reading my goniometer measurement wrong. Palpating at not quite the right area. Not performing this or that test quite correctly enough. And I hadn't even gotten to the hard competencies yet. The ones that didn't just involve having skills read off a list at random to be performed. The ones where you evaluated, treated and documented just as you would in a clinic were around the corner. How was I supposed to pass those?

I'm looking back at all of this now and I guess it's all the more surprising how far I've come. Summer was stressful, because I felt as though I was under so much pressure to pass that come 2 weeks before a competency I would have stress dreams. The week before, all I could do was fixate on the stupid thing: my life as I know it, hanging in the balance - was this the week I get kicked out?

It was a struggle. Last year was rough. For a lot of personal reasons. For personal relationship reasons. For my insurance doesn't cover insulin so I need to save up money and work in case I don't have insulin reasons. For struggling to acclimate to school and a new city reasons. And I nearly drowned in it. School wasn't the priority I needed it to be. My mom even told me about some dream she had this time last year: about me passing fall, and then having some kind of meeting, and a second chance. And I'd finally graduate. And then Spring finished: no meeting: I passed classes. But I failed my last competency. And then I failed that retake too. And I finally passed the last one. And then I was in a meeting about it; about the second chance I'd had. Things had to change in order for me to achieve getting my DPT.
Ever since meeting Kris in fact, things have changed. He stayed up tirelessly before every single competency so that I could practice, and practice again, and practice some more. I haven't failed a single competency since then: no retakes, nothing. I've worked my ass off and stayed at school until midnight some nights just to have a fighting chance at passing. Even the big ones that came this semester: whole weeks of relative terror leading up to an hour and a half of my heart rate being way up as I tried to prove to someone grading me that I deserved to stay in school. I'm not a perfect PT, or even a perfect PT student at that, but you know what? I've passed. And that's a big deal to the student that struggled so hard last year. But, part of me is still afraid to say how I think I did! So I don't. I always just say I can use more experience and improve from there.

It's finals week now, and next semester is my last academic semester before going off to clinic. I can't believe I'm nearly there. Just a week of finals and one more semester and I can go to clinic. 4 semesters down, 4 to go. I can be a PT. It's almost here. It's been a really hard journey, but looking back at the last year of my life in school, I can say this: I've adapted, and I've grown where I need to. I'm still not perfect, and I'll never be a perfect A graduate student. But you know what? I'm still here. I'm still going to be a PT, because I'm going to fight for it. I won't fail. I'm not perfect - but I've fought tooth and nail to be here, and I'm going to keep doing that and keep practicing until I fall asleep exhausted before competencies. I'm going to study myself to death so that I can pass exams in the morning. I'll sacrifice sleep, I'll sacrifice free time, I'll sacrifice fun. But it's all going to be worth it in just a year and a half: because I'm going to make it. And at the end of the day? That's what matters.