Statement Of Purpose For A Career In Occupational Therapy

As a military veteran of ten years, my goals for a career in occupational therapy is to continue to serve those in my community, especially members of the military and their families. Throughout my career in the army, I have been exposed to countless challenging circumstances in which I steadily adapted to, such as continuously changing environments, extensive field training exercise, and parting my family for two tours to Afghanistan. Throughout these events I candidly believe the connection I made with my fellow service members allowed me to not only maintain but excel through these hardships. It was during these trials that I found my purpose in serving, not just my soldiers but people as a whole, that is true to my core.
Now that my military …show more content…
As commonly seen in on-post clinics, the departments operated cohesively in a single department. At that time, I was unfamiliar with the field and had asked the therapist about differences between the two departments, which lead me down a path that would mold my academic career. From that day, my understanding of the field of occupational science is, in its simplest form, a means of living again. However, occupational science is not a simple idea nor has a simple definition. Elizabeth Yerxa defines the field of occupational science as “the study of the human as an occupational being” which still leaves room for inquires as to what an occupational being or even occupation is explicitly. One of the more meaningful descriptions of occupations is that they are “daily living tasks that are a part of an individual's lifestyle” (Golledge 102). Uniting these ideas, occupational science is the study of how humans achieve daily tasks that are unique to their personalized lifestyles. In order to provide care to recover lost occupations it is necessary to understand how humans acquire the skills needed to “pursue our interests,” and “achieve our goals” (Yerxa 91) because why humans participate in their occupations is correspondingly as important to how they perform these occupations. With the emphasis of occupational science being the “multidimensional nature of occupation” therapists “honor the power of ordinary experiences within the context of the health care system” (Clark 300, 302) by understanding the importance of occupations not only holistically as a species, but also the variances throughout cultures. Therefore, occupational science and occupational therapy work symbiotically to define and understand occupations while also providing alternate paths to accomplish these functional tasks in the event of an injury