Name: Adam Engelsgjerd, Class of 2017

Hometown: Scottsdale, AZ

Undergrad: University of Arizona

Fun Fact: I am unabashedly 0/2 in the Palmaris Longus department

After these final two weeks of the semester, Adam will be heading to Orland, CA for his summer clinical.

The goal of PT Exam Lab in our first year was to begin teaching our hands how to feel and assess what our brains knew to be there. For example: we studied the knee from texts, dissection, and lectures and then used our hands to palpate a classmate’s knee with our new, more clinical, perspective. The concept of our hands being “dumb”—or unable to differentiate what was beneath them—soon became all too familiar. Did we feel how there was a slight swelling of tissue on the medial aspect of the knee’s joint line that was the MCL? Sure we did.  Maybe. I mean, it has to be there, right? Let’s look back at our textbook again.

As the first year of the DPT program faded into our first clinical experience, we had the opportunity to translate our education into a real-world setting. Interacting with patients suffering with a myriad of different pathologies, varying levels of cognitive function, and real pains and concerns presented a new challenge: how to conduct PT evaluations. No longer volunteers or PT Techs hoping to one day be admitted to a program, we were now Student Physical Therapists and patients were looking to us for answers. We needed not only to know how the body worked, what normal and abnormal felt like with our hands, but also how to relate relevant information to a patient who may have little understanding of their body except that it hurts when they move.

As my class draws near the end of our last full semester of classroom education, we are preparing for 30 weeks of clinical rotation—seasoned with a few more classes, a comprehensive examination, and the NPTE. Most of us can now all too clearly hear Dr. Tom McPoil’s words echoing back to us: a key challenge of being a good PT is not memorizing a list for a test or performing a skilled act for a practical, but being able to recall the massive amount of information we learn when you need it.

The goal ahead of us is the same it has always been: being able to put together the foundational information about how the body should work, overlay possible pathologies, identify red and yellow flags, conduct a concise but thorough evaluation, and accurately prescribe interventions. Yet, for many of us, it is now that the full scope and weight of that task is being felt.

And so, off we go around the country for the next two months where we anticipate being challenged, exhilarated, and scared all over again. We will once again surface from the classroom to rediscover why it is we’re here at Regis: to help those around us move better and for ourselves to get one step closer to becoming movement experts.