‘I put five years of my life into this’: Seton Hill graduates first class of doctor of physical therapy students amid open job market

As Morgan Simkovic watched her brother receive treatment following a brain tumor diagnosis in 2010, she knew she wanted to be a physical therapist one day.

Simkovic sat in on some of her brother’s physical therapy treatments at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. He completed seven months of chemotherapy and radiation, living cancer-free for 10 years. He died in 2021 following a secondary tumor diagnosis.

But Simkovic never forgot the impact the physical therapists had on her brother’s life.

“They rode scooters around the hospital and played hockey in the hallways,” said Simkovic, 26, of Waynesburg. “In this really dark time for my family, this therapist made us feel very light.”

On Saturday, Simkovic received her doctor of physical therapy degree from Seton Hill, walking across Salvitti Gymnasium with her 17 classmates.

They are the first students to graduate from the program.

For Craig Ruby, this moment was five years in the making.

Ruby of Mt. Lebanon left his job as physical therapy director at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia in 2019 to found Seton Hill’s program. His friends said he was crazy.

“I know a lot of my friends when they heard I was doing this, they were like ‘Are you out of your mind?’ I just said, ‘Well, no.’

“And I did enjoy it,” Ruby said. “I really enjoyed the process of creating a program, and the university support was fantastic.”

Job openings on the rise

For the 18 graduates, there is no time like the present to enter the physical therapy field.

There were nearly 250,000 physical therapy jobs across the country in 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

By 2032, the bureau projects there will be an additional 37,300 job openings — a growth rate of 15%. The average growth rate for an occupation in the United States is 3%.

The bureau reported a median annual wage of $99,700 for physical therapy in 2023.

Pennsylvania was ranked fifth on a list of states with the highest employment of physical therapists that year, charting nearly 11,800 jobs earning a mean wage of nearly $99,000.

Altoona and the Southern Pennsylvania nonmetropolitan area — which includes Somerset, Bedford, Fulton and Huntingdon counties — were also acknowledged nationwide for their high physical therapy employment rates, according to the bureau’s 2023 data.

Altoona had the eighth highest concentration of physical therapy jobs, and Southern Pennsylvania had the fourth highest employment of physical therapists.

Brittney Shoenfelt does not anticipate issues finding employment post-graduation.

Shoenfelt, 27, of Indiana, Pa., plans to find a job close to her hometown.

“From what I’ve gathered, it really depends on what you want to get into,” Shoenfelt said. “For me, I’m from a rural area and I want to practice orthopedics. So for me, there’s a lot of job opportunities.”

It may be more difficult to find jobs in specialty physical therapy fields, such as pediatric physical therapy, she said.

Program opens doors for students

Shonefelt came to Seton Hill in 2021 after completing her undergraduate and master’s degrees in exercise science at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She was drawn to physical therapy for the opportunity to spend more time with patients.

“That’s what I like about PT,” she said. “You get to see the patient until you’re ready to go.”

Shoenfelt was working as a rehab technician at UPMC when she heard about Seton Hill’s new program. She was particularly interested in the program’s mission trip opportunities.

This fall, Ruby and Assistant Professor Jennifer Brilmyer led students on weeklong trips to work at clinics in Jamaica and Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

Shoenfelt went on the Mexico trip, treating patients in a small government rehabilitation building in the city of Izamal.

“It was just an experience I never would have gotten if I didn’t attend this university,” she said.

The physical therapy degree requires students to take four core classes each semester and complete 30 weeks of clinical experience across their three years in the program.

Students start working in local clinics and hospitals in their second semester on campus, Ruby said.

Although they are required to work in one out-patient and one in-patient clinic, students can choose their own path for further clinical experiences.

One student, Ruby said, spent 15 weeks this past school year treating UFC fighters in Las Vegas.

One of the biggest challenges in starting the program, Ruby said, was finding local clinics and hospitals willing to take in students for clinical hours — particularly because the institutions are not paid by the university for doing so.

“They just kind of take them as part of their feeling of obligation to kind of give back to the profession, because somebody at one time trained them to be physical therapists,” Ruby said. “We kind of count on them.”

Pittsburgh’s clinics and hospitals have become over-saturated with students from Pitt, Duquesne and Chatham, Ruby said. Westmoreland and Fayette counties have more space for students.

“We were really kind of overwhelmed by the physical therapy community,” he said. “They really wanted our students.”

In Ruby’s 33 years as a physical therapist, there have always been jobs available with good pay and benefits, he said.

For Simkovic, finding a full-time job at an OSPTA out-patient clinic in Waynesburg was not a challenge.

“Honestly, I hate to say it was incredibly easy, but the demand for physical therapists is so high right now,” Simkovic said. “I genuinely had no intention of leaving my area, but within a 20-mile radius, there were a million companies hiring physical therapists.”

Continuing to grow

Since the first class came through, Seton Hill’s physical therapy program has drawn an additional 60 students, Ruby said. Faculty who came to the program with minimal teaching experience have risen to the occasion.

“I knew they all had the potential to be great professors and faculty members, and they’re all kind of growing into that right now,” Ruby said. “I think as the program grows and now that they’ve all been through this once that we’re only going to continue to improve.”

Ruby will learn in about three weeks whether the program has met the educational standards for accreditation from CAPTE — the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education.

“As I was going through this whole process and putting the self-study report together and sending that in and having the onsite team, it really just kind of hit me — ‘Wow, this is the culmination of five years,’ ” he said. “‘I put five years of my life into this.’

“That whole idea of just really being completely invested in this and making sure this comes to fruition, it’s a terrific feeling to see this group graduate.”