How Mentorship Helped Me Land My First Contract as a New Grad PT

Where I Started

I graduated in May with my DPT, $98,000 in loans, and approximately zero idea of what I was doing. I knew travel therapy existed — vaguely — because a classmate had mentioned it during our final semester. But the whole thing seemed chaotic. Dozens of agencies were calling me before I'd even passed my boards. Recruiters were texting at 9pm. Job boards showed numbers that didn't seem real.

I almost signed with the first agency that offered me a contract. Looking back, I'm really glad I didn't.

Finding a Mentor

A professor mentioned the Travel Therapy Mentorship program in passing — she said a few of her former students had used it. I filled out the form expecting to wait weeks. I was matched within two days with Sarah K., a PT who had been traveling for six years and had 14 contracts under her belt.

Our first call lasted an hour and a half. I came in with a list of questions I'd been too embarrassed to ask anyone else. She answered all of them, including the ones I didn't know to ask.

Learning to Read a Pay Package

Sarah walked me through the anatomy of a travel therapy pay package in a way that no recruiter had. Taxable base wages. Non-taxable housing stipend. Non-taxable meal and incidental stipend. Travel reimbursement. The distinction between a company-provided housing option and a stipend you pocket. Why a recruiter who leads with "all-in weekly pay" is often obscuring the ratio between those components.

She also showed me how to calculate take-home pay accurately — factoring in the tax treatment of stipends (non-taxable, assuming you maintain a qualifying tax home) versus taxable base wages. Two offers with the same gross total are not worth the same once you see how much of each is taxable wage rather than stipend.

Evaluating Agencies

With Sarah's guidance, I reached out to three agencies and asked each of them the same set of questions she'd given me. Two of them gave me vague answers. One gave me a clear, line-by-line breakdown of how packages were structured, explained the contract rate concept honestly, and told me upfront that they were a PT-owned agency.

That agency was ProTherapy Staffing, which Sarah had worked with. She didn't push me toward them. She just said, "Ask all three the same questions and see who answers honestly." The answer kind of answered itself.

The Contract

My first contract was a 13-week SNF placement in Georgia. It paid materially more than the staff offer I had been considering, largely because a big share of the package was non-taxable stipend rather than taxable wage — the pay calculator will show you what that split is worth on any offer in front of you. I was also in a setting I'd already done fieldwork in, which made the clinical transition manageable.

I renewed once at the same facility, then moved to a second contract in Tennessee. I'm now six months into travel and ahead of schedule on my loan payoff. I've referred two of my PT school friends to the mentorship program.