Physical Therapy Graduate Student, University of Minnesota

My name is Mary Mikutowski. I'm a Physical Therapy student at the U of M. So Physical Therapy, as a therapist we are the movement specialist, so if you have an injury, whether you're an athlete or a geriatric population or if you have a stroke or brain injury, anything like that, we're the people who get you moving and getting you back to normal function and having the best quality of life that you can. On a daily basis, we're supposed to block off our day from eight to five. Now we don't have class that full time usually but in the afternoon sometimes we might have either clerkship experiences where we get to go into clinics and either do, like help residents in a nursing home or skilled nursing facility with their home exercise programs. In my second year, we've been going into clinics and doing the evaluations on patients and getting practice that way before we go full time in our third year into the clinics. It kind of depends on where they're starting at and every patient is different. You might have two patients with the same diagnosis but based on their motivation level, their prior experience with injury and pain, each person might have a little bit different therapy and plan of care. But you might start with an evaluation just to see what's wrong and see based on what their symptoms are presenting it with if that's actually the source of their problem or if we need to address something else. And then we also address and see if they need to be referred to someone else, a different care provider. But once we get the diagnosis and create a plan of care then we start with some maybe like strengthening or range of motion or maybe some mobilizations that I would assist with and stuff like that.