The focus of the coursework is pediatrics, which I do not have a lot of experience in. Our fieldwork for the semester will be at an early childhood development center (I'm not sure which one I'll be at yet), and we have projects in a couple different classes that are in conjunction with our peds class. We're also taking a course on teaching and learning, one on professional reasoning, an inter professional health promotion course, and our second research course.
For our health promotion course we have a big project surrounding health education in the community. Half the class is doing it at Boys and Girls Club, but I lucked out and am in the group going to a senior center. We'll be doing a health fair at the senior center.
For our research class we will be choosing a topic for our advanced doctoral experience (ADE) research project. We will be exploring the literature surrounding our topic, and creating a plan for our ADE. We will continue this process in our research course next semester. So this is huge!
One of my electives this semester is occupational therapy in low vision. I'm really excited for this class and I am going to learn so much! We'll be focusing on assessing low vision in the context of an individual's life activities (occupations), and treatment-how the individuals can live and do the things they want to do with low vision. Not only am I excited for the topic, I also love the teacher (Kim Schoessow), and some of my favorite classmates are also in the class (Cora, Richard, and Amanda).
My other elective is going also going to be really fun! It's a program called the Spaulding-IHP comprehensive aphasia program (S-IHP's CAP) We are doing this with the speech language pathology (SLP) students, and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. It's a five week intensive course for eight people with aphasia (a communication disorder caused by stroke), run by eight SLP students, and four OT students at our school. Each participant has daily individual speech therapy, group speech therapy, group OT, and there are additional fun classes at Spaulding including adapted sports, music therapy, swimming, etc. Mary Hildebrand is our advisor who is doing the program with us. The other OT students running the groups with me are Cora, Nikki, and Jade, and we're all super excited. More on the program to come. The next few weeks will be super busy, but I'm going to learn so much and gain valuable experiences!
I have to go work on my aphasia group plan for this week, do my homework, and organize a meeting for the student occupational therapy association (SOTA) professional development committee (which I am chair of). But before I go, here's a 1st day of school selfie (that was taken on the actual first day of school last Monday):
