Student Blog
Community

Faculty Mixers! ⟩
December 1, 2015, by Rashelle

Community Getting Involved School/Life Balance

This year for the annual faculty/student mixer series, students were invited to partake in fun events organized by our student council professional development chairs. I was fortunate enough to be available to attend all three of them this year!

At the first mixer I got the opportunity to show off my (un)impressive bowling skills with Dr. Myka Persson, a previous professor, Carey Sokol, my past fieldwork coordinator, and Amber Bennett, who coordinated the Career Fair, which I attended the day after. It was awesome to see faculty members in such a fun, informal environment, which really allowed me to get to know them apart from the structured school work and meetings. 

The second faculty/student mixer was held at Urth caffe with Dr. Karrie Kingsley, one of my favorite professors, along with Dr. Tracy Jalaba and Dr. Lindsey Reeves, who recently completed their doctorate degrees at USC’s distinguished Faculty Practice. It was an honor to sit next to them over dinner, and to hear about their captivating journies of how they got to where they are today.

Lastly, after my final day of fieldwork at the Keck Hospital of USC, I got to celebrate it with, coincidentally, my fieldwork supervisors! Dr. John Margetis and Dr. Kim Lenington are two of USC’s finest clinical faculty, who taught me the ins and outs of how to intensely care for patients in an intensive care unit. If that was too cheesey, it must be from where my mind has drifted after all of those nachos we ate!

These intimate gatherings truly made me feel welcomed into the Trojan Family. Not only will I feel less intimidated when approaching these faculty members in the future, but also I was able to connect with first year students, who may have been intimidated by me! Every day, with every new person I meet, I see how large this network of Trojans is, and how supportive and encouraging they can be as we go through this journey together.

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OT Thanksgiving Potluck ⟩
November 23, 2015, by Jodie

Community

This year our OTSC Social Chairs, Jen and Benz, coordinated the first annual OT Thanksgiving Potluck at school. Both faculty and students brought entrées, sides and desserts to enjoy with each other. As the holiday season is soon approaching, it is important for all of us to give thanks to each other and this potluck was a wonderful opportunity to do so. Here are some pictures from the event!

Thank you again to our amazing social chairs for putting on such an enjoyable (and filling) event!  😊

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One big happy family ⟩
November 8, 2015, by Jodie

Community

As this semester is coming to an end, I have began to reflect on how thankful I am to have such an amazing group of classmates in the program. Even though we are split into three different cohorts, whenever there is an opportunity for everyone to come together, we are like one big family! Yesterday we had our homecoming tailgate with the physical therapy students and it was a ton of fun getting to catch up with classmates, as well as mingle with the PT students. Our social chairs do a wonderful job planning all these events for us to all come together to have a good time. The next division-wide event that we are looking forward to is the OT/PT Forum and our Thanksgiving Potluck! Stay tuned for my next blog with updates from all the festivities!

And most importantly . . . USC won last night! Fight on!

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There’s No Health Without Mental Health ⟩
October 9, 2015, by Jodie

Community Getting Involved

On Saturday, October 3rd, I participated in the 2015 NAMIWalks LA with a bunch of my classmates as “Team Occupational Therapy,” led by one of our clinical faculty members, Dr. Delgado! NAMI stands for the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the overall purpose of NAMI is to change how Americans view persons with metal illness. NAMI is the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness.

All of the attendees met at Grand Park early in the morning for a pre-walk celebration and then we began our walk around Downtown Los Angeles to raise public awareness of mental illness and to display our support for people affected by mental illness. This was a very fun, 5k walk that took about 2 hours to complete. As I am currently in the Mental Health immersion in the program, this walk was very meaningful to me because I have the opportunity to work very closely with persons affected by mental illness at my Level I fieldwork site at Century Villages at Cabrillo. I am very committed to supporting NAMI in educating, advocating and increasing public awareness of how important mental health is. As a team, I am so happy to announce that we were able to raise over $2,000 in support of NAMI.

If you would like to learn more about NAMI, or to find out about more local NAMI events going on near you, check out their website at nami.org.

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New Friends! ⟩
September 25, 2015, by Heather

Community Diversity School/Life Balance

When I first arrived at USC, I was not anticipating the multitude of amazing people that I would meet. I thought grad school was just about furthering my education to prepare me for my career in occupational therapy. I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

The people here are incredible and I have grown incredibly close to many of them.

The friends that I have made in this program have been some of the most amazing people that I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know. We come from various backgrounds, different parts of the country, and from a wide variety of life experiences.

A large part of my enjoyment of being at school is being with my friends. We spend endless academic and nonacademic hours together, and are constantly involved in each other’s lives.

Without a doubt, my friends in this program have molded my experience at USC significantly. I look forward to our futures as we grow together as health-care practitioners.

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