LEADER IN THE FIELD

Mandy McCrory

November 15, 2010

Leader in the Field

Lead the Way

I am a health and exercise major and my goal is to be accepted to PT school and become a Physical Therapist. For my Leader in the Field I interviewed Mark Brown a physical therapist at Goddard Health Center.

Mark Brown attended Southeastern OK St. University  in Durant, OK  and PT school at OU health sciences center, where I hope to attend. In order to be a PT a bachelors degree is needed and you need to attend an accredited physical therapy school, which last three years.

Mark was a college athlete and was around a lot of other athletes who were getting injured. According to Mark he loved "the idea of working with people to get them better and back to playing and decided to look into Physical Therapy as a career." 

"My favorite thing about my job is seeing the excitement in people when they know they can do something they have not been able to do in a long time like running or playing a sport. Its exciting to give people their life back,"said Mark Brown. I love helping people and the kind of excitement Mark talks about is what I dream for in my job. While there are amazing things to every job there also the things you dread doing or the hard parts to a job, for Mark its dealing with the legality of healthcare and following the rules of insurances that sometimes puts limits on what you can do with people. 

According to Mark, in order to be a good physical therapist you need to be a people person and have a good grasp on fitness and health, as well as the ability to talk to people and encourage them to do things they might not want to do.  As for leadership, Mark believes it is vital for every job in the work field, especially in the health are. Mark says leadership is important for a few reasons. The first is to make sure that the work field is always going forward and progressing. Without leadership, we would still be stuck in the past and not advancing with new treatment techniques. The second reason is that patients respond better to therapists that show good leadership qualities. You cant get someone motivated to work and get better unless you have some sort of leadership to your personality.

I learned many things about the Physical Therapy work field in my interview with Mark Brown, I loved talking to someone with the job I somehow hope to be involved in. My last question to Mark before I left was what kind of advice would you give to someone who is interested in physical therapy? (me for instance) Marks response was to go and shadow as many different therapists as you can to make sure this is the type of career you want to be in. The other would be to keep your grades up, because it doesn’t matter how great a therapist you can be, if your grades aren’t good, you won’t get into PT school. In order to learn more about physical therapy and the different areas you can work in go to www.bls.gov/oco/ocos080.htm.