- Hi, I'm Ernie the rat.
I'm Ernie the rat.
Yeah.
- Hi, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And together we are the most
famous physical therapists on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course.
- Brad, we get a lot of messages from people,
I know you wanna bring this out,
but we get a lot of messages from people
wondering how to get into physical therapy school
or what it's like to be in physical therapy school
and all that, or how, what it's like
to be a physical therapist.
So I thought we'd talk today about the top three ways
to get into graduate school.
- Sure.
- And I thought, these are in our opinion,
and I thought we have a decent opinion, first off,
'cause we both did get in.
- Right.
- And second of all, I just got a daughter
that got into speech, language...
- Pathology?
- Yeah. Pathology or, they call it
communicative disorders.
Almost the same thing.
I would say, if you're trying to get into
physical therapy, occupational therapy,
or speech language pathology,
these all apply.
- Very similar systems.
- Yeah, very similar. - Yep.
- So number one, did you wanna show your rat for somebody?
We were saying this is, I mean,
it's very stressful trying to get into graduate school.
- So Ernie, Ernie the rat's
been trying to get into PT school
for quite some time,
and just look at him.
He's shaking.
It's nervous and stressful.
Just, come on, relax.
There you go.
- Because this is gonna help you.
Number one, and you're not gonna want to hear this one,
but grades are so important.
You just, you can't discount how important they are.
So one of the things you may wanna keep in mind
when you're trying to get good grades,
to pick an undergraduate school,
and I'm sorry to say this, but that is easy.
- Mm-hmm.
- Easier, maybe, than some of the other ones.
If you pick a hard school and your GPA,
let's say you go to a good University of Minnesota
or University of Wisconsin,
University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Very tough schools.
- Yeah.
- And you get a,
because you went there, you get a 3.2, 3.4, you know...
- You'd have to get a 3.6.
It's not gonna, probably isn't gonna cut the...
- It's not gonna help.
But you go to the University of Cow Manure
and you get a 3.8.
They aren't gonna care.
- Right?
- They look at that number.
So, I...
- They put the GPAs up and they go down,
and in my case, they went down 60
and they picked 30 from that,
they didn't, the numbers was the first cutoff.
- I just, we've talked to a lot of people
that were in admissions
and they heavily weight the GPA.
- Yeah. Mm-hmm.
- So, you pick a school that's easier.
The other thing is I would spread out your workload.
If you're having trouble and you're not getting good grades,
go ahead and take some summer classes,
take the tough class during the summer, maybe,
where you can focus all on that.
Or maybe if it takes you five years instead of four,
I mean, it's not gonna do you any good
to get done in four and then not get into grad school.
- Right.
- Because there's no other options then.
Right, Brad? You're stuck.
So, you gotta get those grades up,
no matter what it takes.
- Yeah.
As frustrating as it can be sometimes.
- And that goes along with the GRE, too,
the Graduate Record Examinations.
Now, everybody has to take those.
You have to get good scores on that.
If you have to take it more than once,
you take it more than once.
Study for it, like you would the ACT or the SAT.
You gotta prepare yourself for it.
You gotta get a good score on that, also.
- What about you, Ernie, what did you do?
We'll talk to him later.
- All right.
- He needs therapy.
- Second thing that I think weighs a lot into it
is if you have had some experience
or volunteering in, you know, not necessarily in the field,
but in healthcare in general.
- Right, right.
- My daughter, I'm just gonna tell you right here.
She got into the speech language pathology school,
as I mentioned.
She had 3.65 or something like that.
Very much on the bubble.
Very much.
I mean, just, this is, she's gonna be very lucky
if she gets into school, she did.
She got into one school outright,
she applied to seven,
and she got wait listed at three others.
She ended up getting in three total.
But what I'm saying there is,
she had over 3000 hours of work experience.
- Wow.
- And that's amazing.
I mean, that's, and that stood out,
and I think that's what they looked at.
- When you're on that edge.
- When you're on the bubble.
Exactly.
So, once you went, and I myself,
Brad, you didn't do this,
but when I was in school and I was,
I was a freshman,
I used to pick up the paper newspaper every day.
Now it's probably, do it online.
And I'd see what jobs are available.
And I kept, I looked every day,
and one day a job came available
for an x-ray orderly in the x-ray department.
- Sure.
- Not that close to healthcare, really,
but I went in there, and that did the trick for me.
I mean, I was in the healthcare field.
I had a part-time job for a couple years.
I mean, it looked really good.
You can, a lot of times there, you can get a job as a CNA,
which is a certified nursing assistant at a nursing home.
Again, looks very, very good.
Now, yeah, you can volunteer,
you can go to Africa, you can go to south America,
all that's gonna look good,
but it, I don't think it's a substitute for
being in the healthcare field.
- Right.
- People will, they wanna know that when you are, you know,
become a physical therapist,
that you're gonna stay a physical therapist, so...
- Right, right.
- I think that's really important.
- I know in my class of 30, when we were done,
within a year, two of 'em didn't like it,
one became a social worker
and I think the other one got out,
completely outta the healthcare...
- I had one that got out of it completely.
'Cause she hated working with people,
which is just amazing today.
But she was number one in our class, in grades.
- Yeah. Good grades.
- So yeah, it's very important
and they really don't want a failure rate at all.
- Right.
- So keep the, keep the...
- The third thing we did is, again,
if you're on the bubble,
your choice of which schools you're gonna apply to
is very important.
What we did is we went for,
and we would look at the top 50 list of schools to apply to.
And we'd go to number 49 and 50.
I mean, we did that all the way down the line.
We found out which schools,
and you can also go to their websites,
and you figure out, they'll tell you
what their average GPAs are for acceptance.
- Right.
- And they'll tell you the average GRE scores.
- Sure.
- So it's all right there, and you can figure out,
and you make your list of the seven easiest schools
that you can get into that you're willing to go to.
- According to the GPA acceptance. Mm-hmm.
- The other really good resource,
which, it's just great because it,
people will talk about getting into schools
and they'll talk about not getting into schools.
It's called The Grad Cafe.
The Grad, G-R-A-D-, Cafe, C-A-F-E, dot com.
And that, you can find average GPAs,
they'll say I got into this school and I had this GPA,
and I had this much experience.
- Sure.
- Just, and it's great for, you know,
for people who are lamenting and crying
when they don't get into,
they gotta talk to each other.
But the other thing on it,
so those are the three ways, things I'd look at,
obviously the paper, the interview are all important.
You know, I just think these three are more important.
When Sarah wrote a paper for this, by the way,
Not only did I review it as a physical therapist,
even though she's going to speech,
somebody in the field.
- Right.
- Two, we actually sent it in
and had an internet company review it
to make sure there were no grammar mistakes.
- Oh, sure.
Make it perfect.
- Make it perfect.
But I just wanna tell you real quickly
what it means to be wait listed.
'Cause I think a lot of people wonder what that means.
- [Brad] Say that again.
Wait listed?
- Wait, W-A-I-T, listed.
- [Brad] So what does it mean?
- That means you're not in yet.
And you know, a lot of people wanna know,
what's my chances of getting in when I'm wait listed?
It just varies so much from school to school.
Like I said, Sarah applied to seven schools,
got outright rejected by three,
and she got wait listed at three
and she got into one outright.
And in the end she ended up at,
the three she got wait listed,
she got in two of them,
but one by the hair of her chinny-chin-chin.
I'll talk about that too.
But what you want to do,
when they wait list, what they'll say is,
let's say a school has 30 slots.
Okay.
And they, you think, okay,
they send out 30 letters saying of acceptance.
No, they send out 60 letters.
That's the one school I talked to,
because they knew that at least 30 are gonna reject 'em.
- [Brad] Sure.
- So if you're wait listed,
that does not mean you're 31st on the, or 35th,
or you're probably, you're probably like 65th or 70th.
But the school told me
that they often go deep into their wait list.
- [Brad] Sure.
- One school she got wait listed at
was the University of North Dakota.
They told her where she was on the wait list.
They told her she was 15th.
- Yeah.
- And she did get in on that one.
- Okay.
- The other thing is, I was gonna mention,
so you know, there's a,
you have a decent chance getting wait listed.
It's very discouraging if you don't.
But one thing which didn't hurt us,
Sarah had one school she really wanted to go to.
We ended up having her call one day
in the middle of the summer.
And it just happened that day that someone called
and said they weren't coming to the school anymore.
And because Sarah called, they go,
"Well, let's look at your file."
She got in.
- [Brad] Yeah. Remember...
- She never would, she never would've got in.
So I would be aggressive, you know, unless they
start telling you not to call, I would call.
- [Brad] Sure.
- If you're on a wait list.
- [Brad] I remember that stuff is.
That was pretty wild.
- It's very stressful.
I feel for any of you who's
applying to the school.
You have my sympathy, 'cause it's...
- Yeah.
- There's no greater stress.
You don't wanna wait another year to get in.
- You feel like Ernie looks.
- Yeah.
So you just wanna punch something, so...
Well, good luck.
And if we could, you know, make your comments below
whatever's helped you,
and if you have any questions for us,
put them below too.
- You better believe it.
We're here to help you out.
How about you Ernie?
It's okay.
It's all right.
- You realize you're cutting a rat off a camera.
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