Studying Occupational Therapy - Testimonial from Student Isabel Woo

Transcript

My name is Isabel Woo and I'm doing a Bachelor of Occupational Therapy.

OT I think is it's such creative course and I always wanted to work in the medical profession and my mum's a nurse. She's such a caring person and I always want to be that sort of person and OT really it was a creative way of being able to help other people so something I really wanted to do.

There's so many different aspects and I think for me the best part was knowing there's so many ways that OT’S can help people that I can work in Pediatrics, I can work in geriatrics, it's not just a -  there's only one way to do it so it's a big range of being able to help people.

We do a bit of everything and I think that's quite hard for the public to understand is we can do mental health, we can do cognition, we can do, say you've had a stroke, it's how to get your arm working and so you can button up your shirt, so you can butter your toast. It's those little we call them occupations, so they're the little things that you do in your day and it's how you can achieve those. So yeah, we work in a big range of things.

We've also done two lots of a 10 week full time placement. So my first one was at the base hospital in Rockhampton. I loved it, it was geriatric based, it was sort of yeah, it was just helping them try and get them out of the hospital and doing a lot of cognitive assessments and my second one in Rocky as well was that Autism Queensland? So working with the little ones, sort of just running sessions, getting everything prepared and I ended up getting a job out of it at the end.

Doing the practical placements made me feel so much more prepared that it's you'll learn all the theory, but it's when it's in practice is I think such a big learning curve, so you pick up little things from different placements from different professionals and that can sort of build you to the professional that you want to be.

Honestly like OT I found is such a rewarding career path that you've got to think in the grey, it's quite often something I need to keep referring back to that there's not always one way of doing it, there's not always one answer, but it's how you can support that answer.