Be Careful What You Wish For

A not-atypical day three months ago:

• Walk dogs
• Check e-mail, putter around on the Interwebs
• Realize I'm hungry because it's lunchtime (oops)
  
• Eat in, or call a friend to go out with, or walk downtown for lunch
• Realize it's afternoon and I have done nothing constructive
• Do something constructive for about two hours--work, or go for a run
• Walk dogs
• Ponder domestic chores and maybe do one, or cook dinner if necessary
• Probably more puttering around on the Interwebs

A day I am probably going to have next week:

• Walk dogs insanely early
• Make sure there's nothing violently urgent in my e-mail
• Drive through rush-hour traffic to a large city
• Meet an OT and shadow her for 3-4 hours as she drives around to patients' homes
• Drive home, stuff some food in my face
• Get half an hour to study if I'm lucky
• Abnormal Psych class
• Participate in hour-long psych study for extra credit
• Run home, walk dogs who are mad at me for being late
• Throw dinner together
• Go to Pilates class
  
• Try and write some coherent notes on OT observation
• Study until I slump over from exhaustion

Having places to be. Having goals and structured time. Having something to work toward...all very nice things that make me happy, but yowza, the days are just PACKED.

A Shadowy Experience

Part of the application for the MOT program reads as follows:

Although not mandatory, it is strongly recommended that applicants volunteer and/or work under the direct supervision of an occupational therapist in at least two areas of practice.

Given the insane competition for spots in the program, I translate that as "You don't have a flaming snowball's chance of getting in unless you do this, you twit."

The wording makes it sound like you have to actually work in the healthcare field, but fortunately for me, this is not the case. It refers to a practice that seems fairly common in the healthcare field called job shadowing. Basically, this means that you watch the healthcare professional (occupational therapist, physician assistant, physical therapist, etc.) do his or her job for a certain number of hours--you act as that person's shadow. Sort of a pre-approved and welcome stalker, if you will.

The exciting news is that I have gotten approval to do 40 hours of job shadowing with an OT at a local children's hospital! Even better, I already volunteer at this hospital anyway, so I don't have to worry about getting fingerprinted, background checked, references checked, etc. I'm already in the system, so it will be easy to reclassify me as an OT department volunteer. I'm scheduled for half-days (some mornings, some afternoons) for the first three weeks of August. EEEEEE!! I am so excited about this. It's a children's hospital, so obviously it will be pediatric OT. I'm not sure if it's all outpatient or if they also do some inpatient (though I am sure I will find out quickly enough). The OT mentioned that they also have feeding groups, something I have read about and am eager to see for myself.

When I asked the OT what I could do to prepare beforehand so that I get the most out of my shadowing experience, she said I should read The Out-of-Sync Child by Carol Kranowitz and review my developmental milestones. (And in this case, "review" actually means "learn on my own from the ground up," since I won't have my lifespan course until the fall, too late to help with this placement.)

At this point, I have no idea what population I want to be working with as an OT. We can work with anyone from newborns to elderly patients in hospice, so we truly work across the entire lifespan. I think shadowing is a good idea, both to give yourself a reality check ("Is this really how I want to spend my days for the foreseeable future?") and to try and narrow down your preferences. This shadowing will let me sample both a population (kids) and an environment (hospital setting). I definitely want to do at least one more shadowing experience next spring or summer. I will obviously want either adults or the elderly as my population and a non-hospital setting (skilled nursing facility? rehab center?) as the environment. But first things first--in a few months, I will get to see what I think of working with pediatric OT patients.

The Maddening World of Prereqs

One of the first things I did after deciding to pursue OT was look at the national professional association's website. In the United States, occupational therapists are represented by a 40,000-member group called the American Occupational Therapy Association, or AOTA for short. The website has some good information under the "Students"/Prospective Students tab, including a list of schools offering degrees in OT in the United States.

There is a university about an hour away from where I live that offers a master's in occupational therapy (MOT, although I've also seen it abbreviated as MSOT). I'll call this university BCU, or Big City University. Unfortunately, a college that is very close by, an easy commute, does NOT offer an MOT. I'll call them Local College (LC).

In 2007, the entry-level degree for occupational therapy changed from a bachelor's to a master's degree. So a master's degree is the minimum qualification needed to work as an OT. Most schools do not have a formal pre-OT bachelor's track. People can get a bachelor's in whatever they like and then apply to OT school. However, to ensure a candidate has at least the basic knowledge necessary to do well in a master's program, MOT programs require people to have completed certain undergraduate courses before applying. These courses are commonly known as prerequisites.

Are you with me so far? Good. 'Cause here's where it starts to get a little flaky. Each school requires its own unique set of prerequisite classes. So the set of courses you take to apply to School A may not work at all for School B. There is no standardized set of prerequisites (prereqs). THIS IS ANNOYING.

Now, to really mess things up, these prerequisites are often upper-division (junior/senior) classes. You can't just waltz in off the street and say "Hey, sign me up for Abnormal Psychology. It's one of my prereqs." You can't take Abnormal Psychology until you've taken Intro to Psychology. I suppose that's understandable if you're 18 and don't know diddily about anything, but let's get real--are you really going to fail Abnormal if you haven't had Intro?

Tune in next time for more on prereqs, prereq-prereqs, and other tidbits of insanity!