Lesson 27: The Occupational Therapy Program Application Process
Congratulations. You’ve decided to embark on probably one of the most expensive, time-consuming journeys of your life. The GRE, the personal statement, supporting materials, the supplemental essays, and the interview add together to what can often be a headache. Despite this, Occupational Therapy is one of the fastest-growing professions, experiencing upwards of 15% annual growth. We’ll help you increase your chance of success in getting into one of the most in-demand careers.
This guide helps you conceptualize the overall application while pushing you to consider how each detail contributes to this conception. To grasp it in all its complexity, we encourage you to think about the application as a whole. No part acts independently. As you build a personal narrative, each section builds upon the previous.
An admissions officer will read each section in relation to the others with two questions in mind. First, is this person qualified? And second, does this person truly want to become an occupational therapist? Everything you write should be in the service of assuring the reader these things. In the process of writing, you may encounter self-doubt and insecurity. As with any life-altering decision, these misgivings are healthy and normal, so long as your enthusiasm outweighs your doubts most of the time.
In order to focus on the details, however, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what the application looks like. This way, you can craft your application to answer the two major questions guiding your evaluation.
The application is lengthy and shouldn’t be taken lightly, for people who truly want to be occupational therapists, who have thought about this for years, who have made sure to seek experiences that confirm their desires. This guide will complement the long, hard work of deciding to become an occupational therapist. It will not replace the hours of contemplation and experiences you should undertake before considering applying. You must have already completed the required coursework in undergraduate and shadowed practicing occupational therapists. Students should have at least 40–50 hours of shadowing experience before applying, although many have hundreds of hours. However, these hours must also pair with a compelling narrative that ties these interests and experiences together.
The OTCAS
The American Occupational Therapy Association administers the Occupational Therapy Centralized Application Service (OTCAS). Similar to the Common Application for undergraduate admissions, the OTCAS allows you to apply to multiple programs with a single application. This centralized application consists of:
Personal Information/Academic History: This section contains the information (GRE scores, transcripts, demographic information) that you don’t have much flexibility in crafting. This guide doesn’t cover this component of the application.
Supporting Information: This is the area you have the most flexibility in crafting. This section contains your letters of recommendation (or references), observation hours verification, experiences, achievements, and a personal statement.
Additionally, some schools require a school-specific application, which is outlined on each program’s website.
Upon application review, schools will begin requesting interviews around December, where you’ll have to fly out (or, perhaps even post-COVID, Zoom into) a school where members of the Admissions Committee will interview you. If you’re personable and score high marks on your interview, you’ll then be accepted to the school, where you’ll be allowed to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education to take on the burden of caring for animals and saving the world.
The form of this application is similar to that of undergraduate admissions. It differs, however, in what admissions officers seek. Because an undergraduate degree is a prerequisite for Occupational Therapy Master’s (OTM) programs, it’s easy to think about the OTM application in terms of the applications you wrote five or more years ago. Because of the large number of high schoolers applying to four-year colleges and universities, a huge industry has emerged around gatekeeping these institutions. From the large admissions offices to the test-prep and admissions consulting programs, these applications' audiences are different from that of occupational therapy school applications.
Undergraduate admissions offices are large, complex operations. From marketing schools to providing tours to organizing daily info sessions, the undergraduate admissions office can be likened to an industrial operation. In any successful industrial operation, individuals from all knowledge bases and disciplines come together to provide valuable input on the process to sell more applications. (These offices then make more money on application fees while simultaneously making the school appear more competitive and ultimately increasing its rankings.)
Despite declining enrollment in the humanistic disciplines, undergraduate admissions committees are often disproportionately comprised of members from the humanities. This means essays must be perfect—no comma splices, or misspelled words, or banal metaphors. Given the immense competition, small errors are great reasons for undergraduate admissions counselors to disqualify you from the process. In undergraduate admissions, while content is crucial, form is too.
In contrast, the occupational therapy school admissions office is staffed mostly by practicing occupational therapists and s OTM students. The people whose main day-to-day writing activities include teaching the alphabet to patients who have lost the ability to write or scrawling behavior notes pre-formulated shorthand are the same people reading your application. While many of these people come from undergraduate with disciplines as varied as art history or anthropology, most are far removed from those days.
Consequently, the form of the essays will not be scrutinized as deeply as if it were an undergraduate admissions application. The ambitious creative risks employed by overachieving prospective undergraduates—the essay about napkins in haiku form, the rap about the 1054 supernova observed by Chinese astronomers—are not going to necessarily shift the needle in the way they would for an undergraduate application.
Rather, vivid personal descriptions that highlight your motivations to become an occupational therapist will have a greater influence on your essays' effectiveness. Concise, cogent writing is key. What are the experiences that made you want to become an occupational therapist? How did those experiences do that? Even the most boring experience can be the grounds for a good story, when told right.
This guide predominantly covers parts of the application where you have significant agency to craft during the application process. For other parts of the OTCAS Application, like standardized testing and interview prep, see the resources below.
GRE Prep
https://www.kaptest.com/study/gre/
https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/
Interview Prep
https://www.aota.org/Education-Careers/Students/Pulse/Archive/job-search/interview.aspx
https://www.aota.org/Education-Careers/Advance-Career/OT-Job-Link/Mock-Interview-Questions.aspx
