Lesson 23: The Physical Therapy School Application Process
Congratulations. You’ve decided to embark on probably one of the most expensive, time-consuming journeys of your life. The GRE, the personal statement, supporting materials, the supplemental essays, and the Interview add together to what can often be a headache. Despite this, somehow, over 17,000 people enroll in Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) programs every year. This guide offers resources and approaches to help you maximize your chances that you’re one of the 17,000.
This guide helps you conceptualize the overall application while helping you consider how each detail contributes to this conception. To grasp the application in its complexity, we encourage you to think about it in its entirety. While this guide will focus on each component, it will also push you to think about how each part builds upon the other. No application component acts independently.
An admissions officer will read each section in relation to the others with two questions in mind. First, is this person qualified? And second, does this person truly want to become a physical therapist? Everything you write should be in the service of assuring the reader these things. In the process of writing, you may encounter self-doubt and insecurity. As with any life-altering decision, these misgivings are healthy and normal, so long as your enthusiasm outweighs your doubts most of the time.
In order to focus on the details, however, you must have a clear understanding of what the application looks like and how you can craft it to answer the major questions guiding your evaluation.
The process is lengthy and shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s for people who truly want to be physical therapists, who have thought about this for years, who have made sure to seek experiences that confirm their desires. This guide will complement the long, hard work of deciding to become a physical therapist. It will not replace the hours of contemplation and experiences you should undertake before considering applying. You must have already completed the required coursework in undergraduate and, at the very minimum, have completed at least 100 hours of observation hours in various physical therapy subfields. However, to be competitive, you must have a compelling narrative that ties these interests and experiences together.
The PTCAS
The American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) administers the Physical Therapist Centralized Application Service (PTCAS). Similar to the Common Application for undergraduate admission, the PTCAS allows you to apply to multiple programs with a single application. This centralized application consists of:
Personal Information/Academic History: This section contains the basic information (GRE scores, transcripts, demographic information) that you don’t have much flexibility in crafting. This guide doesn’t cover this component of the application.
Supporting Information: This is the area you have the most flexibility in crafting. This section contains your letters of recommendation (or references), observation hours verification, experiences, achievements, and essays.
Supplemental Information: Some schools have additional requirements, including shorter essays.
Upon review, schools will begin requesting interviews around December, where you’ll fly out (or, perhaps even post-COVID, Zoom into) a school. If you’re personable and make an impression, you’ll then be accepted, where you’ll be allowed to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education to take on the burden of caring for people and saving the world.
This form of this application is similar to that of undergraduate admissions. It differs, however, in what admissions officers seek. Because an undergraduate degree is a prerequisite for DPT programs, it’s easy to think in terms of the applications you wrote five or more years ago. Because of the large number of high schoolers applying to four-year colleges and universities, a huge industry has emerged around gatekeeping these institutions. From the large admissions offices to the test-prep and admissions consulting programs, undergraduate application audiences are slightly different from that of physical therapy school.
Undergraduate admissions offices are large, complex operations. From marketing schools to providing tours to organizing daily info sessions, the undergraduate admissions office can be more easily likened to an industrial operation. In any successful industrial operation, individuals from all knowledge bases and disciplines come together to provide valuable input on the process to sell more applications. (Admissions offices then make more money on application fees while simultaneously making the school appear more competitive and ultimately increasing its rankings.)
Despite declining enrollment in the humanistic disciplines, undergraduate admissions committees are often disproportionately comprised of members from the humanities. Essays must be perfect—no comma splices, misspelled words, or banal metaphors. Given the immense competition, small errors are prime reasons for undergraduate admissions counselors to disqualify you from the process. In undergraduate admissions, while content is important, form is too.
By contrast, the physical therapy school admissions office is staffed mostly by practicing physical therapists and DPT students. The people whose main day-to-day writing activities include your leg's range-of-motion angles, or scrawling pain medications using pre-formulated medical shorthand are the same ones reading your application. While many of these people come with undergraduate majors as varied as art history or anthropology, many are far removed from those days.
Consequently, the form of the essays will not be scrutinized as deeply as if it were an undergraduate admissions application. The ambitious creative risks employed by overachieving prospective undergraduates—the essay about napkins in haiku form, the rap about the 1054 supernova observed by Chinese astronomers—are not going to necessarily shift the needle in the way they would for an undergraduate application.
Rather, vivid personal descriptions that highlight your motivations to become a physical therapist will have a greater influence on your essays' effectiveness. Concise, cogent writing is key. What are the experiences that made you want to become a physical therapist? How did those experiences do that? Even the most boring experience can be the grounds for a good story, when told right.
This guide predominantly covers parts of the application where you have significant agency to craft during the application process. For other parts of the DPTCAS Application, like standardized testing and interview prep, see the resources below.
GRE Prep
https://www.kaptest.com/study/gre/
https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/
Interview Prep
