For my service project this year I was lucky to be a part of an organization as unique and awesome as Best Buddies. In Best Buddies you play games and do activities to get matched with a buddy with special needs that you have things in common with. My Best Buddy’s name is John Woolsey. We both love Cleveland Sports, Dave and Busters and board games. I really enjoyed getting to do a service project that seemed not like service at all. I have always wanted to do more activities like this to prepare myself to be an Occupational Therapist. There was a lot of responsibility that went into this organization as most meetings with your buddy was reliant on you planning times and places to meet on your own account. Unfortunately, my buddy has a tough work schedule to work around so we were not able to attend as many official Best Buddy events as we would have liked. However, it was more rewarding to me to be able to get to know him one on one. I was able to get involved in a great organization here at Ohio State that I recommend for everybody regardless of major or projected job outcome.

Another part of my service project involved doing service through my sorority towards our philanthropy. Tri Delt’s philanthropy is St. Jude. I was able to go on a trip to visit St. Jude two weeks ago and it was amazing to see where all our hard work and service goes towards. So many patients stopped and told us how much of an impact we have made in their lives. St. Jude charges their patients exactly $0.00 which is a really cool and unique thing to me. I learned that there are many Occupational Therapists that work at St. Jude and made me interested into looking into working there in the future.

I was very fortunate to be able to have the chance to get more insight on the interesting world of Occupational Therapy. Shadowing as well as taking undergraduate classes are only the beginning for this field. Being a member of Delta Delta Delta here at Ohio State has given me the chance to meet a wide variety of girls with different backgrounds, majors, and interests. One of these amazing girls is Kelsi Doerrer, a graduating senior here at Ohio State. She is a Human Development and Family Science major just like me. I also was interested to learn that she is a dance minor as well. She is from Mason, Ohio a town right outside of Cincinnati. She told me about her experiences as an undergraduate here at Ohio State and her love for Occupational Therapy. When asked why she chose Occupational Therapy she told me: “I have always been interested in the human body, especially from dancing my whole life and I love people, so I was excited to find a career where I could assist people in living their best possible lives. It will be really fulfilling to me as well. I also did a lot of observation experience which solidified that I wanted to go into this career path.” This related a lot to me and what I am seeking to do for a living so I was happy to hear her tell me this.

I asked Kelsi about her application process, which is something that I have had many questions on. She applied to five schools: Ohio State, Chatham University, Elmhurst College, Brenau University, and Carroll University. She had all of the pre-requisites for these schools and was planning on applying to more but was already hearing back from schools. I had no idea that the application process was like this. I figured that all schools had the same/very similar deadlines and that once you applied you had to wait to hear back from all of them.  These five schools were the cheapest and had very similar statistics to her on the student doctor forum. I will definitely need to do some research on this forum while looking into OT schools. She told me about the OT common application (OTCA) and some tricks to filling it out. She put on all of her volunteering, activities, jobs, observation hours, transcripts, 3 letters of recommendation, and a personal statement. I have attended several personal statement workshops as well as submitted a mock one for my Professional Development class.

Her favorite classes in her undergraduate career were Anatomy and Physiology. I plan on taking Anatomy next semester and Physiology either spring semester or over the summer at a community college, as I heard it can be difficult here at Ohio State. Kelsi says that “even though they are are hard, they are interesting and definitely applicable to OT.” She enjoyed taking statistics and math as she said they came easily to her.

Kelsi was involved in a variety of activities and organizations including being a member of Delta Delta Delta, Health Science Scholars, Pre-OT/PT club (which I am also in), and work at the Rusty Bucket. She was also a research assistant for Human Development and Family Science which is something I would like to get involved in for next semester. I was amazed that I do so many of these activities already as a sophomore and it helped give me hope for my potential future of being an Occupational Therapist. I learned a lot from Kelsi, especially about applying to graduate school and I feel not as nervous about the exams and applications as I thought I would be.