What Kind of OT Do You Want to Be?
April 9, 2025
by Mason
Everyone goes to OT school for different reasons. Everyone has a unique and passionate dream for their future that drives them to work hard. I think one of my favorite parts about being a USC Chan Student Ambassador is hearing just that: having the opportunity to interact with prospective students and to listen to their unique dreams and goals of becoming future clinicians. No one occupational therapist is alike, and one of the coolest things about meeting a prospective OT student, current OT student, or practicing occupational therapist is that you never know what kind of OT they will be. What makes our profession so fascinating and so impactful is our ability to flexibly adapt to serve a never-ending variety of patient populations. What I love most about occupational therapy is that we never stop asking ourselves where our profession should end; instead, we ask ourselves how we can grow, how we can learn, and how we can increasingly serve those around us.
So, when facing the never-ending horizon of a holistic, flexible, and growing healthcare profession, one of the biggest challenges and fears of a current OT student is trying to figure out what kind of OT they want to be. I mean, come on, how many other professions can you name that could simultaneously teach handwriting skills to children in rural areas, rehabilitate hand injuries in an acute burn unit, support babies’ feeding skills in the NICU, develop lifestyle changes to manage chronic diabetes, train self-dressing skills to adults after a spinal cord injury, and so on, and so forth. Let’s just say, when trying to pick a specialty area…it gets complicated.
So, how do you navigate it? Well, to start, what has always helped me has been to embrace every semester, every class, every fieldwork, and every opportunity with an open mind. USC Chan’s OT program was cultivated by OTs working across dozens of unique and diverse specialties. So, rather than have students engage solely in the standards and learn in an academic program focused on just the basics, USC Chan enables students to also learn about the “why not’s”. Our 4 key practice immersions (adult physical rehabilitation, pediatrics, mental health, and geriatrics) teach students the most fundamental skills of how to be an OT across our most historic practice settings. But rather than stop just there, each semester, students take additional classes that begin to teach them to branch out beyond the basic levels of their education. These classes offer students an opportunity to see inside the window of more unique specialty areas of OT (such as preventative medicine, acute care, and non-traditional mental health), and importantly, give them the ability, if they choose, to take hold of their education and explore more niche topics further.
As students enter the second semester of their second year in the program, they gain the opportunity to take elective classes through the division. These classes are often taught by adjunct specialists and experts in their fields and allow students to experiment with new speciality areas they may be interested in. This semester, I had the opportunity to take an elective class that explores the role of occupational therapy in comprehensive adult neuro-rehabilitation, which involves working with patients experiencing spinal cord injuries, stroke, and traumatic brain injuries. I took the class because throughout the program, I had begun to have a real interest in these patient populations and wanted to explore the role of OT in supporting them.
Choosing what kind of OT you want to be is no easy task, and I would bet that even after finishing OT school, many new graduates still aren’t completely sure. But I would argue that when looking across OT programs, make sure to find a program that supports your curiosities and gives you the opportunities to explore them. I think finding learning opportunities after college can be a bit more challenging, so make sure to soak up all the knowledge and information while you can!
That’s all for now, and Fight On!
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