Goals & Learning

My current career goals are to go to graduate school for Occupational Therapy! This degree will help me get a job in Occupational Therapy, and I really want to work as an OT. I have observed OT's and been a patient of OT myself, which is why I started thinking about this career. This year, I will spend more time shadowing as well as putting myself in all areas of the field so I can gauge what I would want to potentially specialize in. After working in this setting more, I realized that I am more interested in the client-focused parts! My favorite part so far has been the times I am interacting with patients and answering any questions they have. I feel a lot more confident about which areas I am the best at, which makes me even more sure that I should go into patient care!

The big thing I need to do next is apply to my graduate school programs starting this May. I have started to look at the exact dates and timelines for when I should apply to my chosen programs. I will gather all my extra materials, transcripts, and evaluations, and make sure I am still on track to graduate next spring.  My next steps are to update my resume and keep compiling all of my program requirements!

Learning Goal #1: To become more involved in the processes regarding research studies.

Relevance: One main way to be always learning is to look at research studies often, and learning how to read those and how they work will help me find helpful information.

Action Plan: I will have access to the R01 study, be a part of the monthly lab meetings, as well as work with Dr. Dellucci in his potential studies!

Progress: I have been going to each monthly and weekly meeting, which has helped create a deeper understanding of what it looks like to be on a research team! I have learned so much about how researchers question and talk with each other, and it has shown me how intentional research teams are. I did not end up working with Dr. Dellucci on his studies, but I still learned a lot about how to read and evaluate papers since I used protocols in my work! 

Learning Goal #2: To learn how to do research and find relevant articles.

Relevance: When I am finding articles, I want to find articles that are relevant and give me information on the demographic that I am working with instead of irrelevant data. 

Action Plan: At my internship, I'll be helping with meta-analysis, have guides in the teams regarding how to find articles, and also meet with one of the researchers to learn how to use PubMed.

Progress: I learned a lot about how to read and find good research, which was my goal! PubMed was really fascinating to learn as well. The teams that I was a part of had a lot of step-by-step guides and explanations to explain the way that evaluating papers/scholarly work. 

Learning Goal #3: To learn how classified data is managed and found.

Relevance: I will have to sort through classified data and this internship is going to help me learn how to use some of those systems and the main HIPPA protocols.

Action Plan: I will be managing all of the contacts with the participants for follow-ups, creating new documents about how to manage the sending out of follow-ups, as well as becoming literate in Redkap

Progress: I learned a lot about the classifications of data and the restrictions behind each. After learning this, I feel more prepared to deal with classified information in the future. I did not know that there were so many types of restrictions, such as Critical-Research and Critical-University! I learned about how HIPAA affects things as small as where you are looking at patient health information.