Student Blog

Feeling like an Olympian ⟩
September 13, 2012, by Alisa

Classes Life Hacks School/Life Balance

This is Week 3 of classes already! Time is flying by so quickly. This week in my Health Promotion and Wellness class, we learned about the importance of having balance. We got to do a balance wheel of a typical weekday, and I realized that I do not have leisure activities during the weekday. So, after coming home from class, I set forth to do a new activity purely for myself. Since I live near the main campus, I have access to the track and decided to take a nice walk there instead of going to the gym. Instead of doing the elliptical like the usual, I craved a breath of fresh air and decided to start slow by walking/jogging on the track. I spent a total of an hour there, but it was very worth it in the end. I got to enjoy the cool breeze against my skin along with my workout music while getting to see students practice field hockey, doing lunges, and running. I enjoyed the atmosphere and simply being outside. Who knows I might enter in the Mud Run or Color Run the next time you see me? For a brief moment on the track, I felt like an Olympian.

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Occupations linking us to our heritage ⟩
September 12, 2012, by Kendra

Classes What are OS/OT?

I got married this past August and something that occupied my mind throughout the planning and actual wedding process was the connection to my ancestors and current family I felt by taking part in this long-lived tradition. For the longest time I was a nay-sayer for weddings, I didn’t want to prescribe to antiquated traditions, I envisioned myself a new-age woman, hear me roar! I still am, but I see now why some traditions live for hundreds, thousands of years. Suffice to say, I get why people ‘get married.’ The feeling that I was experiencing the same jitters, excitement, and annoyances that my mother, grandmother, and one day, daughter will experience, made me feel like I was tapping into something far greater and substantial than just one day of celebration.

One of my classes this semester is Health Promotion and Wellness, and the activity we did this week was identifying occupations that are important to us and what values and emotions we instill into them. All I kept thinking about was the connection to the past I feel when engaging in some occupations. Finding this connection allows for greater value and understanding of the process of engaging in occupation. For example, laundry. I avoid doing it until absolutely necessary, but lately when I am folding shirt after shirt after shirt I think of my great-grandmother, whom I never met, but know that she too throughout her lifespan folded clothes, cooked meals, and got married. Suddenly this seemingly mundane task was far more meaningful. Suffice to say, my class has helped me re-think the ‘why’ of engaging in certain activities, allow the why to create meaning and, ideally, change something burdensome into something meaningful.

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Balance ⟩
September 10, 2012, by Amber

School/Life Balance

This weekend, I spent four days in the mountains near Yosemite at my family’s vacation home. It is a cute little place nestled in three acres of oak and fir trees. My hectic schedule had prevented me from visiting for over a year, so the peaceful country setting was a pleasant shock to my overstimulated city senses. My entire immediate family was there, which totaled eight including significant others and my new baby nephew. The special reason for this visit was that my aunt and uncle had traveled from Oregon to spend a last summer weekend with my family. We took the jet skis out on the lake, roasted marshmallows, cruised the farmer’s market, and enjoyed my dad’s famous BBQ every night. It was a wonderful weekend.

It felt incredible to take time out for fun and relaxation. Today in my Health and Wellness class, I learned that my feeling of rejuvenation came from the insertion of much-needed balance into my activities. I completed a “Balance Wheel” indicating how my time is spent on a typical day. I found that very little of my time is set aside for leisure activities. I learned that to achieve balance in my life, it is very important to set aside time for my own health and well-being, and commit to defending that time. Personal time often gets set aside as less important than other activities in our lives. My goal for this school year is to incorporate more health-promoting activities into my schedule to try to achieve that elusive balance.

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New Occupations ⟩
September 10, 2012, by Paula

Life Hacks Living in LA School/Life Balance

With the start of another new semester, I was concerned about missing out on the luxury of free time that I enjoyed during the two-week break between summer fieldwork and the start of classes. As a result, I have made a goal for myself to find one new, fun activity to enjoy each week so that I don’t get too comfortable or bored with my routine. First of all, so you know a bit more about me, I am a list person. When I feel stressed or busy, I make a list! You don’t want to know how many different lists I have floating around in different notebooks & sticky notes. It is how I maintain structure and balance regardless of my everyday chaos. 😊 Luckily I have been making a “bucket list” of sorts involving activities in Los Angeles that I have been meaning to get around to but always end up putting off, so I have many, many options of activities to choose from. Last week, I finally went to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery for a movie with some friends! For those of you who are unfamiliar with this location, movie screenings are regularly shown by projector in a grassy area of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Viewers attend and picnic prior to the film’s showing. I found this experience to be enjoyable on so many levels! The abundant culture, energy, and the shared appreciation of a new experience in such a unique environment was felt throughout the evening. I highly recommend it to those who are looking for something new, or for those of you who have attended in the past but haven’t been back in a while.

I look forward to continuing to make new occupations and adventures a part of my week and finally crossing some of those items off of my list(s).

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Why I Chose OT ⟩
September 7, 2012, by Alisa

What are OS/OT?

I started out on the pre-med track like many others, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t for me. I didn’t enjoy the courses and felt that my classmates were too competitive. I flipped through the USC Catalogue and considered all the majors USC offers. Being that I have many interests, I could only narrow the list of possible majors down to ten majors. I needed advice from someone whom I could trust, so I turned to my pediatrician of twenty years about what careers I should look into. I told him I wanted to be in a helping profession with the lowest stress possible. He suggested I look into occupational therapy (OT) since his wife is an OT (USC graduate, too!). From then on, I joined the Pre-OT Club at school, saw an OT advisor, and even visited the first and most prestigious OT school in Thailand while on vacation (I should add that the person who greeted me got her Doctorate in Occupational Therapy at USC). The more I looked into OT, the more I got into it.

I felt OT was a perfect fit for me because I get bored easily. In OT I know that I am encouraged to use creativity with clients and tailor to their own needs and wants. Each client that I work with will have different stories to tell and come from various backgrounds. As an OT, I will be able to do storymaking with them. I can empower clients to write their own chapters of life filled with meaningful activities of their own choosing. Through my fieldwork experiences, I have worked with newborns in the hospitals to the elderly in a community-based setting. One day I hope to own my own clinic or day program with a built-in yoga studio, so that caregivers can do yoga while waiting for their loved ones getting OT.

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