11 Reasons Why You Need to be a Travel PT and 1 Reason Why Not
We get asked all of the time “why should I be a travel PT?” In our typical fashion here is our not-so-short answer to this question. Here are our 11 reasons why you need to be a travel PT, and 1 reason why not.
1. Learn from more clinicians
Taking different travel physical therapy jobs every 13 months means new and exciting opportunities to learn from new and exciting PT/OT/SN/SLP co-workers. In every location that you move to there is inevitably going to be a new process or treatment or assessment technique that you can glean from.
We have found that in different areas of the country therapists seem to have different “favorite” approaches. In AK everyone was about body positioning and posture, CO stabilization of anything not yet fused was the rage, CA seems to hammer strengthening. Any clinician worth their credential should know that there is more than one way to skin a cat (or treat sciatica), and travel will expose you to more options quicker than any other career path you take.
Heck, you may have a contract where you see a whole lot of what NOT to do. But that is OK too! It all contributes to your growing skillset and provides you benefit for the rest of your career. Remember anyone can learn from their mistakes, but a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
2. Live in cooler places
Home sweet home… sort of. But how sweet would it be if home was literally ANYWHERE IN THE COUNTRY! Oh, and it could change at your slightest whim (as long as that whim occurs after an initial 13 weeks).
As two former Ohioans ourselves we never could have imagined living in the places we have. Seeing the Golden Gate Bridge from our kitchen window, Being able to backcountry ski 10min down the road, living a block and a half from a private beach, date nights at incredible restaurants within walking distance, or salmon fishing under a midnight sun after a full day of work. We feel so fortunate that we have stumbled upon this career, but what is even cooler is that every traveler we meet feels the exact same way!
Maybe we just choose great spots, but that right there is the beauty of it…we get to choose!
3. Pay off student loans
So many of you are familiar with our story of how we paid of almost $200K student loan debt in less than two years a travelers. You can read about it here or listen to an awesome podcast here. To summarize. Many of us are burdened heavily by loans fresh out of school and are met with jobs that barely make accelerated payments possible or even force PTs to take income based payment plans. The interest pit that is dug can quickly feel insurmountable. With travel pay being so much more lucrative (read more about this here if you don’t believe me), as long as you maintain a reasonable lifestyle, rapidly snowballing your debts becomes a very real reality.
4. Live near family/friends
Having the freedom to move about the country lets you not only check out cool spots, but also to hang with cool people! For us we have capitalized on this perk to spend 5 months with family after Kinley was born. We opted not to necessarily live WITH family (not sure how well that would have gone over) but we were close enough to visit on weekends and even to make some week day jaunts if needed.
Living with friends/family is another great way to save on housing expenses however it must be pointed out that you need to have a formal lease agreement and to pay a fair rate for your room. That being said, a room in a house is generally far cheaper than getting your own apartment or house on a short term lease.
5. Expand your comfort zone
When we landed our first contract in Oakland, California working home health I’d be lying if I said we were cruising in like we owned the place. We were scared to death! Not only were we very inexperienced in home health, but we had never dealt with in Bay Area traffic – let alone spent much time in gang territory of any kind! I remember being worried about what color of scrubs to buy thinking that somehow it would matter should I be treating someone with ties to one gang or another. WOW.
During that contract our perceptions of inner city Oakland and the Bay Area in general rapidly evolved. We learned shortcuts to bypass traffic headed over to San Francisco, we adapted to the paperwork demands of home health, and most importantly we learned that people are just people no matter where they live or who lives on the same street as them. (It also helps that the gangs here are largely delineated by street and if you there to help someone on their block you are A-OK with them. It was shocking how many “Hello Sirs” and “Afternoon Sirs” I got from young men hanging out of luxury cars stopped at a street corner.)
6. Grow clinical experience
Changing jobs every 3-12months lets you change clinical settings as well. Each change comes with new and overlapping skills that will expand or reinforce your clinical knowledge base. Also, each state and hospital system is slightly different, there are other skills that you can add to your toolbox that you may not have ever expected to experience. In Washington State, PTs do PT-INRs for post-op patients. How cool is that? Here in CA we are working with clients coming home from total joint surgeries that they had less than 24hours prior. If I would have stayed at my perm job I would have never been able to manage such acuity this well.
Many PTs falsely believe that travel PT is where your clinical skills go to die. This simply is not the case. I know far more deadbeat outpatient ortho therapists who have intentionally NOT learned anything since PT school than I do travelers who have done the same. Your career is what YOU make of it. Travel PT can be a springboard to new ideas and a new direction in your professional life. It sure has for us.
7. Make friends all across the country
So this is quite easily one of the coolest and least discussed benefits of travel PT. We feel incredibly fortunate to have met the people we have met and made lasting relationships that extend across age gaps and thousands of miles.
The freedom of not knowing anyone in a new town can be overwhelming at first, but once you realize that you are not tied down by friendly obligations to old friends (not that these are bad things) you have the liberty to go out and do something different and meet new people.
8. Travel the world!
I feel funny writing this one because we have yet to make this one a reality. Unless you count a few trips north and south of the border for skiing and beach-ing, we have yet to make it far from ‘ol ‘Merica. However, when we started traveling, it was our grand plan to do so (if the kid hadn’t dropped in on us early!) and we have many many, many friends who consistently do.
As I described above, since you are making more money than ever and working a job that can end essentially at any point you wish as long as its written in the contract ahead of time, there is tremendous freedom to explore the world. Most travel PTs who go internationally do so for vacation and not work. They work high paying contracts for however long they need to save up for their trip, then they go! Simple as that! No obligations back home, no patient list they need to manage. Just a plane ticket and some awesome travel plans!
Oh, man it sounds so exciting I can barely stand it!
9. Avoid burn out!
We all know how the story goes. Bright eyed new grad, eager to join the workforce dives into an outpatient ortho job they are stunned to find available. Undeterred by the mini-mountain of student loan debt behind them (that is “good debt” as we are taught to believe) and the less than overwhelming pay ahead they happily dive in head first, determined to “make the best of it.” Then the productivity standards kick in, the documentation piles up, more aides and assistants utilized and less patient faces remembered. Interest on that loan builds at an alarming rate and just when they feel they are getting a grasp on the clinical side of their life, finances are spinning out of control.
Phew! Thank GOD that isn’t our lives any more! But it once was.
Burn out is a real and serious issue facing PTs. Meredith Castin, PT, originally wrote this article about it, going into far more depth and clarity than I could (you should seriously read it. She is great). And then later built an entire website dedicated to PTs so burnt out by clinical life that they are searching for other ways to put that six figure three letter degree to work. (Found here).
Travel PT does not fall on her list of jobs on the website, given that it is still clinical, but is mentioned in the original article as a legitimate remedy to the burnout cycle. For all of the reasons mentioned before and to come, travel PT is often the perfect blend of rewarding clinical work and exciting and lucrative lifestyle.
10. Write a bigger story.
When I was in undergrad my dream for my future was as follows:
Live in a quaint suburb of a midsize Mid-West city. Wife, couple of kids, and a dog (of course). I’d coach the local soccer team. Watch college football every Saturday and pro every Sunday. And on non-football weekends I would work on the house and the white picket fenced yard.
This is no joke! This is what I actually THOUGHT I wanted!
Flash forward to my current reality:
Traveling all over the country with my crazy wife, 2 crazy dogs, and what is turning out to be pretty crazy little girl. We backpack at 10,000ft and drive 6,000 mi just for a birthday party. I treat patients who look and talk and act nothing like me and I get to share part of their life with them. Oh, and I get to share some of this stuff with you all!
Life is so much BIGGER than I ever imagined! The people and places and experiences that are thrust upon you through travel PT create the perfect characters and setting and plot lines to choose your own adventure tale.
11. Travel PT needs YOU – another badass clinician!
The common thread that runs through this entire blog, all 100 or so articles, is the call to excellence. As students we were told, falsely, by our professors that travel PT is for bad clinicians who cant hack it in perm jobs. Not true.
When we started as travelers we were two of only a few OCS trained PTs in this realm. More and more we are coming across others who have made the leap. Being an elite clinician is about taking pride in your work and having a love for your patients. With those two key attributes it doesn’t matter if you are temporary or permanent, you are on the path to being an elite PT. (conveniently we have a course available to you if you are searching for a way to take the next step on that path. Check it out here.)
Part of what we want to do here at PT Adventures is build up the reputation of the travel therapist. In order to do that we need YOU! We need other PTs who are excited to be therapists and also excited to explore the country (and make a little more money along the way). Travel PT is not a place for bad therapists to hide and its is not where your clinical skills go to die. It is time we shook off that reputation once and for all!
Reasons NOT to travel:
1. You do not like new things and/or awesomeness
In the world of travel physical therapy, change is one of the only constants. Changing jobs and changing locations as rapidly as every 3 months can be overwhelming to the uninitiated or ill-prepared. And it is completely unreasonable that it may be too overwhelming for some therapists to manage. Obviously through resources like this site, our course, or a handful of other travel therapy related blogs, our hope is that you will be well equipped to make the leap and enjoy a long and successful career traveling and exploring all of the wonderful facets of our unique vocation. There are going to be those who are quick to doubt you or who will rattle off a dozen reasons why you shouldn’t travel or why they “just couldn’t possibly make it work.” But everyone has opinions (everyone also has something else as well…).
Change is hard because it means that our life has deviated from the common everyday pattern of doing things. Our brains, wired for efficiency are forced to make new connections, solve new problems, and draw new conclusions. It is energy costly for our brains to have to process all of these new inputs and create new synapses to connect and reinforce. Our brains are lazy and don’t like it. But guess what? Our brains are also highly adaptive. The challenges we face today will be minuscule a year from now. Just think about how hard freshmen year was, when you had that first weed out course and had never been forced to study (like, for real study) before. Then flash forward to graduate school. Sitting in Advanced Pathophysiology, brain overflowing and drool oozing out of the side of your mouth as the professor expounds on some obscure cytokine and how it impacts the phagocytotic process …longing for the good ol days of that very same class that plagued you in undergrad. You have adapted. You have grown.
Tackling the challenge of the change involved in travel therapy is a growth and development process. We thought it was hard at first. Then it wasn’t. We thought adding a second dog along the way was hard at first, then it wasn’t. Now we travel with our little girl, tacking challenge after challenge along the way. And every day it gets easier. Not because we are so unique, but because our brains can adapt. Just like yours.
Written by: Stephen Stockhausen PT, DPT, OCS
