Occupational Therapy Major at Iupui

[T. Fisher] I'm Dr. Thomas Fisher, and I'm the chairperson of the occupational therapy department in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Indiana University Medical Center - Indianapolis. Today I'm going to talk with you about occupational therapy. We are a health and rehabilitation profession that is interested in getting people back to what's important to them. Our modality is occupation, and those are the activities that people engage in the majority of their day. [M. Orban] My name is Meagan Orban. I'm entering my second year of a two-year program here at IUPUI for OT, and I chose OT because when I was first starting my undergrad, I always wanted to work with kids. I was pretty sure that I wanted to work in the health-related field, so I chose the pre-med track. [R. Tutor] I'm Rachel Tutor. l'm currently a second year student here at the School of Occupational Therapy here at IU, and I began here with an undergraduate degree in therapeutic recreation from IU in Bloomington. And when I was in school there I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I was kind of thinking dentistry. I always knew I wanted to help people and be in a medical profession. [T. Fisher] A potential student, what you would need to think about because the profession has moved to post baccalaureate, is that you'll either be getting a master's degree or a doctoral degree in occupational therapy. Here at Indiana University it's a Master of Science in Occupational Therapy. [M. Orban] My favorite class is the lab that we did with pediatrics because that's what I'm really interested in. We had a lot of hands-on experience. We got to go to the Center for Youth over by the Ronald McDonald House, and we got to administer some Denver II screenings to see how kids were doing developing mentally. [R. Tutor] Broad range of field work experiences. I started out at Riley Children's Hospital. I had an amazing supervisor that was really good at telling me not just what we were doing but why were doing it and the goals we were accomplishing. So it really helped to tie together what we were learning in class what you are actually going to do in clinic. [T. Fisher] We accept students with all sorts of bachelor's degrees. The most popular ones are psychology, therapeutic recreation and biology and education. However, we've had students that have come from nursing, physical therapy, social work, economics, as long as they have the prerequisites that will help them come into our curriculum. [M. Orban] After I graduate I would love to move out of Indiana, sadly, and work with kids. There are a lot of options not only just working with children, but in several different areas you can work in the schools, you can work in transition planning moving children who may or may not be living in group homes, you can work in community-based settings and then as people age, you can work in older-adult settings at the day programs like I volunteered at. [R. Tutor] Currently I'm really wanting to focus on peds. I may go into teaching or geriatrics. I'm not really sure. We haven't had those experiences yet. We'll wait and see how those work out for me. I definitely would like to work in an outpatient, maybe like a smaller pediatric clinic in a littler town. I'm kind of a small town girl, so that sort of fits my personality. [T. Fisher] We believe, as a profession, that having that variety of baccalaureate degrees coming in for their graduate work is helpful because it emphasizes the importance of the human in all facets in not just the biological and physical but also the psychological and social.