Student Blog

#AOTA16 — Trojans take on Chicago ⟩
April 15, 2016, by Joe

Community Getting Involved

It’s my favorite time of year!

Last week was the AOTA National Conference in Chicago, IL. This conference is the largest gathering of OT practitioners, researchers, and students in the world, with an estimated attendance of over 10,000 people!

USC Chan is world known for our contributions to research & practice through global leadership and innovation. It’s so exciting to meet Trojan alums who are blazing new trails in OT practice and leading the profession in local, state and national organizations. There were over 100 Trojans speaking at conference, myself included, and several alums receiving prestigious awards such as the AOTA Roster of Fellows Award, and the AOTA-AOTF Presidents’ Award.

As the Chair for AOTA’s Assembly of Student Delegates, I preside over an annual meeting with students from OT & OTA programs across the country.

Aren’t we a fun looking bunch? The Assembly brings the student perspective to AOTA at large, and also acts to bring AOTA initiatives & opportunities to students around the country. There are 3 Trojans on the Assembly Steering Commitee: Myself as the Chair, Ellen Wleklinski MA ’15 and current OTD student as the OT Vice Chair, and Lizzie Peters MA ’16 as the Secretary. We also have 2 USC Student representatives in the photo: Kelsey Peterson, current first-year, and Ann Borreson, current second-year.

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AOTA National Conference Highlights! ⟩
April 14, 2016, by Rashelle

Getting Involved

My first AOTA conference was amazing! While Jodie, Joe and I all attended, we each had very unique experiences.

I volunteered at the welcoming ceremony where I got to walk in the 50+ year members of AOTA. It was an incredible honor, and you should’ve seen my beaming ear to ear grin from behind that sign! It was an incredible feeling to know that in 48 years I could be walking in line with these phenomenally dedicated practitioners.

The USC Trojan Alumni Party is always a great time! This picture shows just some of my 2nd year colleagues that I mingled with surrounded by professors and program graduates.

I was able to see the famous Hull House that we learn so much about through our Foundations of Occupational Therapy course. This is one of the places that cultivated the initial paradigm of healing through occupation!

At the Exhibit Hall I was able to speak with poster presenters, OT companies, and supply vendors! Through the poster presentations I learned about programs being developed all throughout the nation, while networking with practitioners and students with similar interests. As you can tell, there was a lot going on! I loved this because the Expo Hall truly provided a booth that fit everyone’s interest, and room to expand your interests even further!

Attending this conference was only possible through a scholarship that I had acquired through the OT department! I entered a video submission for the OT Extravaganza student video contest and won! Thank you to the OT department for providing me with such a wonderful learning, growing, and meaningful conference experience.

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The next step . . . ⟩
April 14, 2016, by Heather

Beginnings and Endings

Happy OT Month!

As we are winding down the semester, these cohorts of students are getting ready to graduate in a little less than a month.

Cheers to walking across the stage on our way to the next journey!

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So close to the finish line! ⟩
April 13, 2016, by Jodie

Community Getting Involved

This month has been filled with many deadlines and celebrations. First and foremost, April is OT Month so we celebrated as a division with our OT Month Kickoff event held at our Health Science Campus. This was a super fun event where we passed out FREE pizza and OT buttons and faculty and students had the chance to socialize and celebrate occupational therapy during lunch!

This past weekend was also AOTA’s national conference in Chicago, which I had the amazing opportunity to attend. I went to numerous short courses and poster presentations and was so inspired by what occupational therapists are doing around the country! I think my favorite thing about attending conferences is being surrounded by people who are equally as passionate about occupational therapy as I am. I felt so inspired by all the presentations and conversations that I had with fellow conference attendees. I am already looking forward to next year’s national conference in Philly!

To top it all off, April happens to be the birth month of my two childhood best friends AND my dad! That being said, I have been very busy planning celebrations for each of them and balancing my time between schoolwork, extracurricular work, family/friend time and “me time”.

I am doing my best to balance my time and to cherish every second of every day in the program. This program really does fly by in the blink of an eye. We are so close to the finish line and I am so excited to see what the future has in store for my classmates and I!!

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HabitKick! ⟩
March 23, 2016, by Ariel

Externships

Hello again readers! It’s nice to get back into the swing of things now that we’re all back from our externships. If you need a refresher on what externships are, check out Heather’s blog!

Lots of students go abroad for their externships. I have friends who went on trips to Ghana, Korea, Philippines, Thailand, Japan, and Ireland to learn more about how OT is practiced in other countries.

For my own externship, however, I decided to stay more local. Specifically, I completed my externship wherever my laptop was, because mine was a hands-on project! For my project, I designed a mobile app called HabitKick, which essentially aims to help users replace cigarette cravings with health-promoting behaviors.

At the beginning, I had no idea where to start. I had never done anything like this before, and all I had to move me forward was an app concept that I wanted to explore. However, after meetings with professionals from several disciplines, lots of trial and error, receiving feedback from friends and family, and performing a real-life trial of the main functionality behind the app, I was able to make better sense of how mobile technology can be used to help our patients form healthier habits and curb nicotine cravings.

Before diving into the whole design process, I began by simply ruminating on my idea — speaking with smokers I knew who were trying to quit and asking them informally about what kinds of features they would want to see in a smoking cessation app. The most exciting idea I heard was “I wish there was an app out there that could predict when I’m about to have a craving and then tell me to do something else to distract myself instead, like taking a walk or brushing my teeth.” The idea took hold in my mind.

I wanted to come at the project from a uniquely occupational therapy lens, so I made sure that the fundamental theory behind my app with regard to habit change and formation tied back to the concepts I had learned as a fieldwork student at the USC OT Faculty Practice. I set out to design an app that would learn when users tended to have nicotine cravings throughout the day (ie. “in the morning when I first wake up, at 6pm right after work) and then help them curb those cravings by suggesting alternative health-promoting activities to do instead at those times. The idea itself has grown and morphed a lot over the course of the design process, but the main crux of it still remains.

Overall, the externship presented a great opportunity for me to engage with occupational therapy in a way that I had always wanted to try my hand at, but had not had the same structure to carry out at prior points during the program.

Externship experiences are as unique as the 100+ students in each graduating class. If you’re a first-year student, or plan on entering USC’s OT program in the coming years, hopefully this little peak into my externship experience will give you some inspiration to start thinking about yours!

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