Student Blog
My Room and the Person-Environment-Occupation Model ⟩
September 20, 2013, by Clarissa
Life Hacks Living in LA School/Life Balance
This past week was so eventful with fun, fieldwork, and organizing my room! The Occupational Therapy and Science Council held a pool party at one of our classmate’s beautiful apartment complex in downtown Los Angeles, the Medici, with yummy food and good company! I also had my first day at my Level I fieldwork this week at a school-based pediatric setting, which was really cool. My clinical instructor was so great and I’m excited to go back!
Surprisingly, though, room organizing was the highlight of my week. I’ve been living out of a suitcase after returning to LA post-Level II fieldwork. Standing in that inferno of clothes and papers, I was thinking about the Person-Environment-Occupation (PEO) Model that I learned about in my Mental Health immersion last year and, yes, I started OT-ing myself. My occupation is being an OT student, my person factors included my decreased motivation to study whenever I looked at my room, and my environment was a chaos of my personal belongings (minus the one clear walkway from my door to my bed). To improve my occupational performance as a student, I went to work and I am now SO EXCITED that I like being in my room again! My bookshelf is also the new apple of my eye. The moral of the story here: stay balanced and make time for the little things.
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Turning Work Into Play ⟩
September 19, 2013, by Jen
This past week, I had the opportunity to work with children in an occupational therapy clinic setting. I was very impressed with how well the occupational therapists I observed were able to make a treatment session look so much like play. For example, an adorable child was getting occupational therapy services because of a fine motor delay in performing certain tasks that involve small movements with this child’s fingers. This child normally gets very frustrated when performing a task that involves small movements, but one of the goals for therapy is to be able to pick up Cheerios independently. The occupational therapist found a way to make this task fun for the child. The therapist found out what motivates the child and used this to their advantage in order to get the child to participate. This child LOVES the show Blue’s Clues, so the therapist created a Blue’s Clues-themed treatment session that required the child to practice their fine motor skills. The child enjoyed the session and also worked on needed skills!
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OTSC Retreat ⟩
September 19, 2013, by Jen
This past Sunday was the annual Occupational Therapy and Science Council (OTSC) retreat. This was the first time the new OTSC executive board met and discussed plans for the year. I was very excited to hear everyone’s ideas and got to know each member of the board. We have a lot of motivated and diverse members on the board, so I know it will be an exciting and successful year. The executive board is made up of about 30 first-year and second-year master’s students, an OTD representative, and a PhD representative. Some ideas discussed included getting students motivated to attend the 2014 American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) conference in Maryland, fundraisers where money will be donated to non-profit organizations, and new social events. After the board met, the rest of OTSC (which includes all graduate students in occupational therapy) was invited to join us for pool party and barbeque. It was a great turn out! We made it a potluck and there ended up being more than enough food for everyone to stuff their stomachs. This was a fun and casual way to build unity between the many students in the Division.
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Fieldwork Out-of-State? ⟩
September 17, 2013, by Kate
I have lived in Los Angeles for 11 years now, which is such an amazing feat. I can’t believe that in August of 2002, I drove from Denver, Colorado, to Los Angeles with most of my belongings, ready to start a new adventure. My undergraduate years at USC were the best four years of my life, and in 2006, I decided to stay in the City of Angels. My parents moved to Seattle, Washington, when I graduated from USC in 2006. I have loved visiting them and exploring a new city that is similar to, yet different from, my hometown of Denver.
As I made my way into a new career path and my journey with occupational therapy, I have a new and exciting adventure to begin. USC’s outstanding team of fieldwork coordinators offers over 750 placements across the country, and I’ve decided that I am going to take advantage of these out-of-state opportunities. I just put in a request with our fieldwork team to be placed somewhere in Seattle for my Level II fieldwork next summer! What an exciting (and a little bit scary!) decision! Now it is in the hands of the fieldwork coordinators to place me in a facility where I can use my existing skills to learn and grow even more. What can I say?? I CANNOT WAIT!!!
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Just learning some cool stuff over here! ⟩
September 16, 2013, by Ryan
There was an interesting article that I read this weekend for my OT 504: Health Promotion and Wellness class called “Exploring Balance as a Concept in Occupational Science” by Penelope Westhorp (2003). Westhorp discusses the concept of “balance in lifestyle” through an occupational perspective and suggests that research should be done to look at the many aspects of balance. Throughout the article I kept thinking, “What is lifestyle balance, really?”, especially for me. When I think of balance, I think of equal parts sharing the weight. Is that what I need to do to have a balanced lifestyle? Make sure that I do the activities throughout my day equally in relation to time, energy, and attention? But that doesn’t make sense to me. How can one do that, truly?
When I think about a typical day for me and the things that I do, maybe I could separate my time so that each activity throughout my day had the same amount of time and was balanced (i.e., one hour of house work, one hour of school work, one hour of television, etc.). But when I think of the things that I do that are meaningful in my day, I just don’t imagine that I could actually sustain a lifestyle balance of putting a certain amount of time on something like, spending time with friends and family. Or that I could do a craft or looking things up on Pinterest for an allotted amount of time. Personally, I don’t do well with that type of restriction and would not be able to maintain that type of routine.
For the sake of really trying to think about living a balanced lifestyle, it would be better for me to balance my day in a more simple way. To break down a day for me in its simplest form would be the things that I like to do and the things that I have to do. When I think of days that I feel really balanced it is because I have done productive and fun activities throughout my day. That is what I think I need and, after reading this article, it just confirmed what I was thinking.
This also confirms why we need research on occupation as well as occupational balance so that we can understand each individual’s perspective on his or her occupations and what is meaningful in order to help balance his or her lifestyle. It is a really cool experience to read something that seems so simple like this, but that can then open your eyes in such a big way . . . even as you are reading it!
😊 Ryan
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