One down...Three to go

Well, I made it through my first full-time clinical. I must say, despite all the complaining I've done about it, it went so much better than I anticipated. I learned a lot in the 8 weeks I spent there and I feel a lot more confident in my abilities, although I know that I have a long way to go. My CI gave me amazing ratings on the CPI (clinical performance instrument that we get graded on). I totally wasn't expecting pretty much all entry-levels, but it was a huge confidence boost. This just makes me want to try harder in the future, take my studying more seriously, and really live up to my full potential. I'm so grateful for the outpatient experience I gained at this clinical, because my next rotation is outpatient orthopedics. Although, I'm expecting the evaluations to be more complex and more complicated in the outpatient setting, I'll be completely honest and say that I'll be so grateful to not have to deal with IVs, blood lines, and feces.

As far as the gift situation for my CI, I went with the safe route and got him a thank-you card and a $15 gift certificate to amazon.com. I'm so glad I did, because he ended up getting me a card and a $15 itunes gift card. I would have felt so horrible to have received a gift and not given one, so at least it all worked out and there was no awkwardness. I was kind of sad to end this clinical, mainly because my CI and I seemed to have the same work-personalities and I think we worked really well together because of that. For example, I don't like to leave paperwork and documentation for the last minute (or even at the end of the day). I like to get it done while the information is fresh in my mind and also so that I am not bombarded with paperwork at the end of the day when I want to go home. My CI is the same way, so we were able to work very efficiently. I'm kind of nervous that I might end up working at one of my next clinicals with a CI who likes to procrastinate and spend a lot of time chit-chatting throughout the day when we could be getting work done and leaves a ton of paperwork and patients to see at the end of the day. I won't work well with someone like that. I was really fortunate to end up with a CI this time who works like I do.

So now it's on to 4 days of class and then studying the rest of the summer away. I plan on really putting in a huge effort from now on because I am currently signing my notes as "student PT" and by May, I want to be signing them as "PT DPT CSCS"