On a late August night in the midwest, while watching rows of corn and soybean whiz by with my window down, I realized what I wanted my future to look like.
When I was sitting down at my kitchen table, going through the list of colleges I was admitted to, I knew exactly which one I wanted to go to; the one furthest from home. It wasn’t because I didn’t like being close to home, it was more so that I just wanted to be free and finally become my own person. I am so grateful every day that this school, Denison University, also happened to be debatably the best school I was admitted to. To say I enjoyed my time, even the tough times, at Denison would be an understatement. One of the most memorable experiences I had at Denison was doing research focused on dry needling with my primary advisor, Dr. Brian Hortz. I focused on this for about a calendar year (summer 2018 - May 2019). During the summer of 2018, I first began the research by getting acquainted with the dry needling literature and the many perspectives of the underlying mechanisms. During this time, I deployed a survey about Athletic Trainers’ current competences regarding dry needling via Qualtrics. This work ultimately led to a successful publication. During the 2018-2019 academic year I continued this work through more exploration of the verified mechanics of dry needling.
What is dry needling? The answer will vary depending on who you are talking to. Those who do not believe in its efficacy will call it a pseudoscientific method to put some more money in the pocket of a therapist. This opinion has this view because the literature has mixed results and current graduate education does not teach this as a therapeutic modality. Those who believe in its efficacy would define it as a scientific spin off of acupuncture. This opinion has this view because it focuses more on patient reported outcomes and experiences. Objectively, dry needling is a technique of using monofilament needles to manipulate cutaneous and subcutaneous structures. As you can see, its worthiness is currently of hot debate in the literature, among clinicians, and with state licensing committees. There are those that believe it has no place among more traditional medicine and others that believe we need new practices like this. Personally, I would say there is little question about the positive effects of needling a body because it is still practiced to this day and there is validity in positive experiences, even without a complete understanding. Once our techniques and research can capture these changes more objectively and accurately, I think it will become more accepted. But for now, we are stuck in academic purgatory, drawing arbitrary lines in the vast sands of the unknown.
This project opened my mind to what it meant and felt like to be a researcher. It gave me a taste of the addictive feeling of sitting on the edge of what we know. I loved every aspect about reading scientific articles and then trying to form a full picture. It was fascinating and overwhelming all at the same time.
I was, and still am, always, on the lookout for new opportunities to simultaneously improve my knowledge and make money. This led me to sheepishly raise my hand my sophomore year when a professor asked for volunteers to TA Applied Anatomy. I had taken the course the previous year and honestly didn’t that well. It wasn’t my first instinct to raise my hand because of my insecurities about my performance in the course, but it’s made my top 5 list of best decisions I’ve made so far. About midway through the semester, a student approached me and asked if I could tutor them in the topic. I had never tutored anybody, but it was a way to log more hours and get paid more, so the answer was a resounding yes. Little did I know this would my first official introduction to my second addicting experience during my undergraduate degree. I found myself getting more and more excited about my tutoring session and taking on more students. I realized that I craved the challenge of forming the knowledge I have into something that would be not only understandable, but interesting to my tutees. It was thrilling finding these creative solutions and tailoring education to a specific individual’s experiences. It felt like the way education should be dispersed.
Upon talking with my advisors (Dr. Eric Winters and Dr. Brian Hortz) and having my cornfield epiphany, I came to realize that getting a PhD was the path to opening as many opportunities as possible under my passions in teaching and research. As a current graduate student, I can say thank you to my previous advisors on their sound advice about my next step to make my passions my reality.