In this lesson, you will learn about:
- Organizing your research.
- Comparing other professions.
- Researching OT schools.
- Some tips to get started.
The first step is to get organized. Your teachers probably emphasized the importance of outlining before writing your essay, drafting, or brainstorming before you begin a large project. The same applies to your career choice. You may be a journal and clipping or you may prefer digital. There is no wrong way to do it. I personally prefer digital because I tend to lose things in real life, but I am actually very organized digitally. The Internet has a lot of good ideas if you prefer the traditional method. Do a Google or Pinterest search for bullet journaling to get some inspiration.
Digitally, I recommend making a Google Drive or Dropbox folder and then creating subfolders from there. Why a cloud-based method? Because of backups. Your computer may break, get stolen, corrupt, hacked, malware, etc. All of your hardworking could potentially get lost and you will have to start over, or worse yet, you may lose the motivation to continue. Another great digital tool is called mind mapping or concept mapping. It is like a flow diagram that allows you to organize the thoughts in your head into visual bubbles connected by lines. The great thing is that the way you link these connections is up to you and you can always go back and change how it is organized. There are many free online websites and even apps available to do mind mapping. This is a lesson in itself, so I will not go into it, but I will go over the more common method of creating a spreadsheet.
So go into Google and create a Google Sheets file. Organize it however you like, but I would get started with different professions you are considering. for example occupational therapy, physical therapy, and nursing. Next, create some columns for important things to compare. I would put “schooling time, degree earned, tuition cost, salary, job outlook, and prerequisites”. Schooling time is how long it will take to complete. This is important because it is time out of your life, and potentially lost income because you will not get to work full time due to school demands. If you are currently working at a job, it is a very important financial decision. Degree earned is important to compare because it can be very different, from needing an Associate’s degree to a Doctorate’s degree. For example, COTAs need an Associate’s but to be a practicing physical therapist, you will need a Doctorate’s degree. This can highly influence your decision in choosing your next career move. Tuition is pretty self-explanatory. The more extensive the program generally, the higher the salary, but it is not necessarily the case. Job outlook is how professionals perceive the job market to be like and how many jobs will be available. Prerequisites are the classes you will need to take to prepare for the program. I would put in a number, such as nursing needing 5 while being a doctor needs a 100, for example – of course, these are made-up numbers. Feel free to add additional columns as appropriate such as job satisfaction, pros and cons, and so on, but do not get too caught up in this as you can do more work and research than is necessary.
As you narrow down your decision and ultimately come to and decide on occupational therapy, haha, you can make an occupational therapy specific spreadsheet, for example, and go from there. I’ll show you an example of someone online who made a great spreadsheet for occupational therapy applications. Some of this information may even be available already so do some Google searching.
What resource is my favorite for doing this type of research? Hands down, I recommend BLS dot gov. This is a website for the US Bureau of Labor & Statistics. This means it is a reputable resource and also it is accurate because you can compare apples to apples instead of doing Internet searches which may have data from unreliable sources or comparing different times to each other – such as salaries earned from different years, which won’t work. BLS is great because it has information on each profession and is well-organized. Some data points I love that they have are salary, degree required, job outlook, even their own section on “how to become” a specific type of practitioner. A lot of the research can be obtained and copy-pasted from this website. It may be tempting to just look at salary, but remember to factor in tuition, work requirements, job satisfaction, and job outlook. For example, nurses may make a lot of money, but their job is very stressful, their burnout rate is very high, and it is very competitive. One cool thing they have is the “Similar Professions” tab that shows other careers that you may never even heard about before. One more thing, make sure that your school is accredited. This means that the school is officially recognized or authorized to teach occupational therapy. Good luck in your research! Once you have made up your mind to become an occupational therapy practitioner, check out the next lesson – I know you will!