Spotlight on… The College of Health and Human Services Stacey Wallace Occupational Therapy Major Since high school, Stacey Wallace has wanted to work in the field of occupational therapy (OT). That desire never faded as she moved with her family from Germany to Washington State, and then finally to Saginaw, Michigan, with her husband. Wallace took two years of classes at SVSU starting in 1994 and came back to finish her degree in 2015. Little did she know how much writing that would involve. Although crafting poems, which she sees as an emotional outlet, is something Wallace enjoys in her free time, she does not find it translates directly to OT. In fact, Wallace states that writing reports about patients is a skill to which she is getting accustomed. Wallace explains, “OT students are trained to be concise with their language because they need to be able to take an individual’s entire background and history and somehow condense it down to the most important information that insurance companies or other medical workers need to know.” Although writing concisely may not be as enjoyable as writing creatively, she has found satisfaction in writing within her classes. While working with Ellen Herlache-Pretzer, associate professor of occupational therapy, and Stacey Webster, an instructor of occupational therapy, Wallace was given the opportunity to conduct research on Vision Coach for the past year and a half. Vision Coach is a machine used by therapists to help improve patients’ reaction times, but because Vision Coach is less than a decade old, no normative data was in place that would help track patient progress. Wallace and two classmates consequently spent months conducting tests with the machine, collecting data that can be used by others. Beyond the benefit of this data, Wallace appreciated that the resulting document she helped produce was a collaborative effort. Although many students find group work to be a source of frustration, Wallace loved co-writing the 30-page manuscript of research findings with fellow students Demytria Walker and Lee Wilford. According to Wallace, most work in the OT program is done collaboratively, and, as such, students need to be prepared for this aspect of the field: “You’re going to be working with other people—other doctors, other occupational therapists, patients, family members, insurance companies. Requiring collaboration is an asset of [SVSU’s] program. When you work with other people, you learn their strengths and weaknesses as well as your own, and you are able to talk to each other, take advantage of your strengths, and work on fixing your weaknesses together.” Wallace and her co-authors are now turning their manuscript into a 15-page journal article in hopes of publishing it in Occupational Therapy in Health Care. Wallace appreciates that her instructors do so much to prepare their students. For example, through the program, she was given the opportunity to work hands-on with a stroke patient eight hours a day for two weeks. Such opportunities, like writing itself, are challenging, but valuable: “The amount of work, writing, and collaboration that needs to be done in the program can be overwhelming, but that’s just real life. In the field, you need to constantly work with people and for people, and it never stops, so you just have to keep rolling with it.” Wallace is slated to graduate with her master’s degree in December 2020 after completing her last round of fieldwork. From then on, she will certainly use the writing and critical thinking skills that she has acquired to help, she says, as many people “from their brains to their toes, from birth to death, with abilities and disabilities, and everyone in between” as she can.
74
Writing@SVSU
