Psalm 23 for Occupational Therapy Interns

The LORD is my Shepherd,

I shall graduate this school year.

He makes me sleep at night for two hours,

He refreshes me for my paperworks.

He leads me beside my laptop so I can complete my reports,

He keeps me awake.

He guides me towards effective treatment plans for His Name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of running demerits,

I will fear no re-rotation for You are with me.

Your revelations during my prayer time, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my clinical supervisors.

You help me implement treatment approaches,

My confidence overflows.

Surely final forms and high-yield learning activities will follow me throughout internship,

And I shall dwell in the House of the LORD forever.

One of this year’s highlights is that I became a clinical supervisor (CS) at the Clinic for Therapy Services, my alma mater’s standalone therapy center. This isn’t the first time that I became a CS. I supervised occupational therapy (OT) interns at the Independent Living Learning Centre in my first year of practice.

Based on my experiences so far as a CS and as a former OT intern, I can say that the greatest obstacle to student clinicians’ success is their difficulty in accepting everything that is wrong about themselves and the world.

They engage in all sorts of machinations to avoid facing harsh realities. Procrastinating from doing their reports is the most common way that they evade challenges. While that may seem benign at first, some interns let their late papers pile up until they feel too overwhelmed to finish and submit them. A few of these interns eventually went AWOL — which is ridiculous because they only got re-rotated to the centers that they disliked for giving them so much paperwork. Unfortunately, some dropped out of the program altogether. That’s quite sad because they were academically brilliant students.

OT interns behave in other stupid ways too, like bullying their co-interns, fighting with their CS, and even by getting into inappropriate relationships with the healthcare facility staff. Their common denominator was their desire to appear to themselves and to everyone that they were better than what they were.

Internship as a Source of My Healing

I, for one, contemplated suicide as a way to escape internship difficulties. I craved validation so much then. Unfortunately, people only seemed to notice what was wrong with me as an intern. That was hard for me because I was an honor student for the most part of my life and was therefore not used to failing despite exerting a lot of effort.

In hindsight, the experiences of not getting validated were the “green pastures” on which God made me dwell. I needed to go through a stage in which my weaknesses were so glaring that they eclipsed any strengths that I had. For one, it trained me to remain emotionally stable despite all the failures and criticisms. Secondly, they revealed to me my flaws that I got to correct when I was still a student before they became problems for me as a licensed clinician.

Finally, internship gave me a much-needed focus. What I’ve never told anyone before was that at that time, I was tempted to run after a certain guy even if he liked someone else. Thankfully, my workload as an intern was so overwhelming that it compelled me to channel all of my energies to seeing 8-10 patients per day, with each of them requiring one hour of therapy session. Then I worked on mountains of patient reports at night. The free time that I had was spent on praying and Bible study because I could not have survived without my devotional time. Then before I knew it, my broken heart had been healed.

Green Pastures

God has to “make” us lie down in green pastures because we often can’t identify them ourselves. Most of the time, it’s because those circumstances reveal to us our incompetence and character flaws in painful ways. For OT interns, they come in the form of difficult patients, reprimands from clinical supervisors, nerve-wracking therapy sessions, and sleepless nights over seemingly endless paperwork. Yet those situations are the crucible that will bring the best out of them. And once interns survive their clinical rotations, the positive changes in their character as well as the rewards that come with being an occupational therapist will far outweigh all the challenges that they need to overcome.

A blessed Christmas to my UPM-CAMP family, especially to our OT interns!

(Photo by Dan Kiefer)