I graduated from Port Townsend School of Massage in 2016. Many of the instructors are excellent…read more The manager of the school is personable, intelligent, and knows how to interact with many different personality types. She went to great lengths to accommodate my individual needs due to my health condition, helped to personalize and tailor my educational experience, and overall treated me (and pretty much everyone else, from what I saw and heard) with respect, caring, and consideration.
I had some mixed feelings and some negative experiences throughout my time at this school, which is why I waited so long to post a public review, but in all fairness, many of those experiences are due to my own "stuff" and are not the fault of the school.
I was enrolled in the week-end program. 2 10-hour days of classes back-to-back on Friday and Saturday, then a 6-hour day of classes on Sunday, often with homework or study or giving massage post-classes, felt like a lot to do within a short, compressed period of time. By Sunday afternoon my brain and body were often both fried and unable to absorb much of the content. I'm not sure how the school could've structured it much differently, though, and without the week-end program option, I (and many others) could not have gone through the program at all.
The school has 3 separate floors and no elevator, which sometimes felt frustrating when I was dealing with a months-long ankle injury that I sustained during the process of receiving a massage at home from an LMT who is unaffiliated with this school, in order to complete a school assignment.
I put a lot of effort, time, thought, work, and money into my massage school education at this school, and in hindsight it is one of the few times in my life that I feel that I may have invested these resources poorly. However, it was my own (frequently questioned!) choice to stay in the program until the end. My self-care during this program was much worse than it usually is, in a large part due to the program demands. The compromised self-care definitely took a toll on my physical and emotional well-being.
I graduated with a 4.0 gpa, but my passion for and enjoyment of practicing massage was dampened by the end of the program to the point that it never recovered. I never practiced massage professionally. I tried to force myself to want to, and stayed optimistic for a long time post-graduation that I would bounce back eventually, but finally realized that my enthusiasm for practicing massage therapy has been permanently extinguished.
Some of my favorite moments during the program involved working with some of my stellar classmates, learning from and connecting with a couple of the instructors and also with the school's manager, giving massage to paying community members in student clinic, giving massage to many of my own practice clients, engaging with some of the anatomy and kinesiology course material, and creating my own board game to help in learning the muscle attachments (happily, creative learning is appreciated and encouraged at this school).
Attending this school is one of only 3 regrets that I have in my life. However, once again, a good portion of the reasons behind that are not the fault or responsibility of this school or its faculty or staff.
Understand that this may not be an easy educational journey, even if you are smart, resilient, and start out passionate and enthusiastic about massage therapy, healing, and helping people.
Recommended for an excellent massage therapy school education, with reservations.