Lesson 28: The Occupational Therapy Program Personal Statement
The Essays are the main opportunity to tie activities and experiences together as a means of truly connecting with the people who read your application. Ultimately, you want to write an essay that makes the reader want to become your future professor or colleague. The OTCAS application requires one 7,000-character, or about 1300-word essay. While this length can sometimes seem long, it’s an incredibly limited amount of space to convince the admissions committee that you’re someone they want to have as future colleagues or students.
For the 2020 application cycle (and likely future application cycles) the personal statement prompt is:
Your personal essay should address why you selected OT as a career and how an Occupational Therapy degree relates to your immediate and long-term professional goals. Describe how your personal, educational, and professional background will help you to achieve your goals.
This prompt allows you to really get into your core motivations for becoming an occupational therapist. A personal statement is not the space to rehash from the activities and experiences sections the core responsibilities you had shadowing in an occupational therapist’s office. This is the time to discuss your experiences with the patient who could barely click a Bic pen, who, with enough patience and focus, now writes in a journal nightly after recovering from a traumatic brain injury.
This is the time to discuss your experiences with the veteran returning home from Afghanistan, who couldn’t concentrate, who, after sitting with you for hours playing simple mind games, graduated to being a prime chess player, crushing you with his knight-rook one-two punch.
In general, you’re going to want to tell your reader why it’s inevitable that occupational therapy school is the next step in your journey. However, you don’t tell the reader this by saying, “An OTM program is the inevitable next step in my journey.”
You show it by explaining to the reader the things you’ve done that have gotten you to the point where you’ve concluded, Hm, I think I’m ready to spend nearly half a decade of my life and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a career making people’s lives better, or at least less bad.
This usually means recounting an event or a set of events that created a turning point in how you view the world and want to contribute to it. A good story comes from the deep, dark crevices of that turning point. You may not even consciously know that turning point exists, so think deeply.
Why did you decide to volunteer at the OT office? What was it about the teenager with seizures that impassioned you so much?
The easiest way to write a compelling story is to write from a specific event. A specific example is compelling not for the content itself, but for the specificity that drives the narrative forward.
Writing a good story means starting with a vision in your head and translating that vision to the written word. However, language is an imperfect medium to express those intangible images—sometimes lingering, sometimes fleeting—that sit in your mind. Language will never truly crystallize the vision you have up there, but you must start with that vision if you’re ever going to get anything close.
The Definitive Medical School Applications Guide expands upon this attitude towards writing. For more advice on crafting a compelling application, consider reading the following sections:
4. “I’m not convinced he wants to be a doctor”: What Not to Write About and How Not to Write it
5. How to Write your Essay: Two Approaches
6. Cleaning Up the Mess
8. Activities, Activities, Activities
While these sections describe the Medical School Application, their implications reach far beyond this application. Figuring out a writing method that works well for you and determining how to group, describe, and order your experiences apply equally to the OTCAS application.
