OT with Bethany

Usually when I meet people for the first time, I have to explain what OT is to them. It used to make me sad that OT is not more well-known, but now I see that I have so many opportunities to promote OT to others!  So what is OT? In OT school, they teach us to have an "elevator pitch," which is an explanation of OT that is short enough that it could be explained during an elevator ride. Here is mine: "Occupational therapy works with people who have a disability or are recovering from an injury. An occupation is any activity that is meaningful to a person, which could be anything from brushing your teeth, to driving, to hanging out with friends. We use occupations to return our clients to their highest quality of life. For some people, it may be completely regaining their independence. For others, it may look more like adaptation of their environment. We work with people across the life span, so kids, adults, and older adults. We practice in many places, such as schools, h

 I thought it would be helpful to include the application experiences of one of my professors as well as one of my peers to give more diverse perspectives on the application process.  I asked Dr. Samia Rafeedie, a clinical professor of occupational therapy at USC, about her application experience. Dr. Rafeedie told me that she didn't feel she had a good chance of getting into OT school, because she had a 3.2 GPA. She also knew that the school she was applying to, Ohio State, only had 60 spots with 280 applications. But Dr. Rafeedie really believed that she would be a good OT, so she sought to get strong letters of recommendation and wrote a personal statement about what she would bring to the table as an OT. Dr. Rafeedie shared with me that her personal statement portrayed a parallel between being an immigrant and a patient, as she wrote about her experience immigrating from Palestine. When her family came to the US, they did not know the language or the culture. But there was an A

I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Kristin Nxumalo, who is a member of our admissions team here at USC. I interviewed Dr. Nxumalo in order to gain some insight into the admissions process, and I was pleasantly surprised by a lot of the things she shared with me that I can't wait to share with you! One of the first things Dr. Nxumalo and I discussed was how admissions truly are holistic. In my post about my personal application process, I believed admissions were holistic, and so it was great to hear Dr. Nxumalo confirm. Dr. Nxumalo stated that many people believe USC to be into impressive GPAs and GREs, but the personal statement and short answers are weighted just as heavily because USC truly wants to get to know the applicant as a whole. I think this should be a great comfort to anyone who feels the numbers on their applications are not impressive enough for OT school. A couple of my classmates had GRE scores below USC's minimum, but they were still accepted! So work har

I think what most people are interested in are what statistics do you need to get into OT school, so here are mine: Undergraduate school: UCLA Major: Psychology, BA GPA: 3.4 GRE: 150 Q 154 V 4.0 Writing Volunteer hours: 250 See? No crazy stats here! I remember my relief when I got almost the minimum score for verbal on the GRE (the minimum for SJSU is 153). I remember feeling that my GPA was a bit low, compared to the 3.6 "average" I would see online. I didn't list my pre-requisite GPA because every school has different prerequisites, but I believe I had an A in all of my prerequisites except for anatomy I got a B. That being said, I always encourage applicants to not compare stats because every applicant is so different! I feel that schools really do look at you holistically, so it is hard to say you will or will not get in just based off of how your stats compare to others.  Here are the schools that I applied to as well as my admissions decisions: USC: accepted SJSU: a

Hi there!  My name is Bethany and I am currently completing the second year of my occupational therapy master's program at the University of Southern California. I have created this blog in order to share my OT experiences, with two specific goals in mind. One, I distinctly remember searching up statistics on OT applicants, to compare and see if I even had a chance of getting into OT school. I remember getting discouraged when I would see applicants post on forums such as Student Doctor Network with 4.0 GPAs and 1000s of hours. I remember thinking to myself that I would probably have to apply for 5 years in a row in order to get into OT school because my stats were nowhere near theirs. So my first goal for this blog is to give a more realistic and informed perspective about getting into OT school. I will be sharing my own application experience, as well as my peer's and my professor's application experience. I will also be interviewing our USC admissions team about the appl