USC OT at Yonsei University in South Korea!

April 8, 2015
by Claire

안녕하세요! (Annyeong Haseyo! Hello!)

That is the greeting used in South Korea!

It was nearly two years since I’ve traveled internationally, and it sure felt great to use my passport again.

This trip was for our Leadership Capstone course for the Master’s in Occupational Therapy at USC; the purpose of this externship trip is to see the development of leadership and administration in areas related to OT! We had two weeks in March to complete our leadership externship. With six other fellow Trojan OTs, we traveled across the world to South Korea, thanks to the coordination of Global Initiatives at USC OT! Their Facebook page is facebook.com/USCChanOSOTGlobal.

We were hosted by the Department of Occupational Therapy at Yonsei University and they did a spectacular job at taking care of us. I am excited for their students to come visit the United States!

Considering that my Korean vocabulary is limited to short phrases, I am grateful that our Korean OT colleagues worked hard to speak English with us. I am also incredibly grateful for our Korean-speaking classmates who have stepped up to the challenge of translating for us!

Korea’s culture is very different from Western American culture, and its impact on the Korean occupational therapy profession has been a regular theme in our conversations. We have been meeting with the OT graduate students and professors, and every single one of them is extremely passionate about pioneering occupational therapy in Korea. We got to learn about their research interests, how to translate western OT assessments so that they are relevant in an eastern cultural context, and how different policies affect practice. We also had the opportunity to visit different sites, including a community based mental health organization and a private pediatric clinic.

There are simply too many stories and pictures to be shared! Overall, it was a wonderful visit. We all left feeling more connected with other OTs around the world — no matter what culture, our mission is the same! I think all of us are also a lot more culturally sensitive to the clients who we work with too!

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