Why all the occupational therapy growth?
The latest class in the doctor of occupational therapy program at Slippery Rock University is at capacity with 30 students. There are already 27 students expected to enroll in the program next year, meaning administrators may ask to expand its capacity.
Miranda Virone, occupational therapy program director at SRU, said the university is accredited to teach up to 30 students per year through the Accreditation Council of Occupational Therapy Education. The specific student capacity is meant to keep a good student to faculty ratio and ensure “more robust teaching and learning opportunities.”
But Virone said the accrediting organization allows institutions to surpass class capacity by 24%, so the OT program can accept seven additional students if approved by the university. This may be the move for the program leaders because occupational therapy has gotten more applicants for the past three years.
“It's not the largest cohort the program has seen in 10 years, but it is one of the largest, it's of the top three largest,” Virone said. “We did have a cohort of 35 back in the early stages and that was the largest cohort we've ever seen, so we are on pace to break that record.”
The doctor of occupational therapy program started at SRU in 2018, with development starting in 2016 to start the program at the university. It accepts students from a variety of undergraduate programs, like sports medicine, exercise science and psychology, according to Virone. SRU’s program requires students to earn 100 credits over three years or eight semesters.
One of the students in the 2028 cohort is Eliza Reynolds, a second-year OT student at SRU. The cohorts are organized by the expected graduation date of a student.
Reynolds majored in sports medicine with a concentration in pre-occupational therapy and minored in psychology at Mercyhurst University, with the intention of pursuing a doctorate in occupational therapy. Despite the growing popularity of the program at Slippery Rock, Reynolds said Mercyhurst did not have an occupational therapy doctorate or graduate program, and she was one of only two students in her graduating year to have a focus in the major.
She also said she was unaware of occupational therapy until late in high school, but found the work she did volunteering to help with life skills classes rewarding enough to seek out a potential career doing similar work. That is when she stumbled onto occupational therapy.
“I volunteered. We were working on things that the life skills children were working on - simple meal prep and money management and overall it's a life skills class, and I really, really enjoyed it,” Reynolds said.
“When I researched it and did papers on occupational therapy, I thought, 'Wow, this is an incredible career that needs more advocating and needs more people to go into it,'” Reynolds added. “So, I was able to do some shadowing and really fell in love with it.”
Virone said the program at SRU increasingly integrates occupational therapy applications as students progress through their semesters. In the first year, students are introduced to the profession through foundational courses like neurological applications and movement applications of OT, to bridge that program from undergrad to graduate school.
As students move into the second year, the program focuses more on knowledge integration and practice courses. These include adult applications, pediatric applications and an advanced application course of merging practice areas. Additionally, there is a course that focuses on education about occupational therapy — students learn how to educate clients about the practice and also how to teach other adults about the practice.
“Some of our students could very well go on to teach occupational therapy programs, so we prepare them for that as well,” Virone said.
Another requirement of the program is students do two, full-time 12-week experiences, spanning a total of six months in the field. They finish off their degree with a capstone project, where students have to implement an occupational therapy project in the real world.
“They are identifying a need, a gap in community services where OT could really be the lens and the profession to fill that gap,” Virone said.
While the program leaders have not yet begun talks to expand the enrollment capacity for next year’s incoming cohort, Virone said they are monitoring trends in interest in occupational therapy. She referenced a statistic from U.S. News & World Report identifying occupational therapy as one of the best 100 jobs across the U.S. with a six-figure median income across the nation.
Virone also said the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics is projecting 15% growth through 2035, which is five times higher than all other occupations, and 10,000 projected job openings in the profession each year in the U.S.
Speaking on the local trend, Virone said many of her students have cited personal experience as their reason for entering the field of occupational therapy. “A lot of them have had family affected by a disease and have seen the impact on their family members' lives and that is their why,” Virone said.
Reynolds came from the camp of personal experience.
She said she is passionate about the elderly population, and hopes to use her degree in occupational therapy to help people who are aging. But she is still keeping her options open when it comes to career aspirations.
“I loved my level one fieldwork, applications class that I took in the fall of my first year and I have a level two fieldwork scheduled at Niagara Therapy in Erie,” Reynolds said. “I'm really trying to keep my options open and keep an open mind because OTs can work with everyone from birth to end-of-life.”
