By TJ Pinto, OTD ’24
For the past few years, my two cousins, my sister, and I have selected one weekend in October to travel to a new location for the weekend. Our first trip was to Washington D.C., where we stayed in an Airbnb with an incredible host on a street that just happened to be having a crazy block party on the exact weekend we were visiting. Our most recent trip was to a log cabin in the Shenandoah Valley, where we spent the weekend playing games and hanging outside on the deck in the middle of the valley as we laughed and talked until the sun came up. In 2019, our destination of choice was Boston. At the time, I was a recent college graduate who had just officially decided to pursue a career in occupational therapy. This weekend was a mini-vacation away from all the daily tasks that had transformed my Google Calendar into an abstract art piece of colored time blocks. At this point, my average week consisted of working as an exercise technician at an outpatient rehabilitation clinic, shadowing OTs in school, outpatient, and acute care settings, and taking my remaining prerequisite courses at a local college. When looking back on this weekend, I remember standing in front of the Old State House in Boston and being mesmerized by the contrast between this historic building and the modern high-rises surrounding it. As I walked the city, I found myself falling in love with it, actually being able to see myself living there at some point in my life. After a morning of sightseeing and walking the Freedom Trail with my cousins and sister, I remember everyone wanted to take a quick break to rest our legs and grab some coffee. As we sat in a little coffee shop, I pulled my phone out and quickly searched the American Occupational Therapy Association’s website and looked for programs that were near Boston. During this quick search, I found Tufts, promptly added it to the long list of schools I was interested in at the time and then continued on with my weekend trip in Boston.
Just a matter of months later, the world had changed drastically, as we had entered the beginning of a pandemic. After being furloughed from my job in March, my day-to-day life was pretty repetitive. I would make avocado toast in the morning, finish all of my schoolwork for the week by Tuesday or Wednesday each week, go for a bike ride around the neighborhood in the afternoon, and color in my anatomy coloring book while simultaneously bingeing any and every Netflix series I could find in the evening. With OT applications opening in just a matter of months, I decided to sign up for as many virtual information sessions as I could, taking notes and trying to narrow down the number of schools I would actually apply to once applications opened in July. At one point, I must have attended ten separate information sessions in a three-week period. On one evening in May, I closed my bedroom door, adjusted the lighting in my room, and opened Zoom like I had done for the numerous other information sessions before this one. I remember Jill Rocca starting the meeting and introducing herself as a Tufts OT graduate and a current Admissions Coordinator. She was so genuine and happy to share her personal experiences from the program while also allowing current OTD students to talk and answer questions about their experiences as well. I could feel myself becoming more and more excited by the idea of joining this program, as I loved how many opportunities there were for hands-on learning, from the service-learning opportunities that take place in your first Fall semester to your fieldwork experiences. As someone who is particularly interested in the idea of working in hand therapy and wound care down the road, the fact that students in the OTD program could take upper extremity and hand rehabilitation courses alongside practicing OTs overjoyed me. Most importantly, all of the current students expressed how approachable the OT faculty was and how supportive everyone in the program has been from the very beginning, from the faculty to their fellow classmates. I remember going downstairs after the information session concluded and walking straight up to my mom and saying, “I have to go to Tufts.” It just felt perfect.
Fast forward to November. I had submitted all of my graduate school applications and had been back to working as an exercise technician for a few months. I had the poor habit of refreshing the email app on my phone approximately eighty times a day, just hoping that I would eventually see an update about my Tufts application. At this point, I knew that decision letters could be sent out at any moment, but I just didn’t know exactly when. However, on November 17th, 2020, at 10:02 am, the email notification popped up on my home screen. I immediately felt my stomach drop and a sense of panic overwhelmed me. After weeks and weeks of trying to convince myself (and others who asked me about it) that I would be completely fine if I was not accepted at Tufts, it all flew out of the window the second as I received this email. Without even taking a second breath, I rushed to open my phone and clicked on the email. I then read the one word that I truly was not expecting to see, “Congratulations!” I fell to the ground and started quietly screaming to myself, “Oh my gosh! I can’t believe it! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!!” Later, when my mom had gotten home from work, I shared the news with her and she immediately burst into tears. After listening to me gush over this program for months and share how much I would love to attend, it was now a real option for me. It truly was a feeling like no other.
This past April, my mom and I drove up from Delaware to Massachusetts together in order to visit Tufts for the first time. My mom is the reason I wanted to become an OT in the first place. After a tragedy that had occurred back in 2017, she was in critical condition and was bed-bound for months, requiring intense physical and occupational therapy to get back to living her life independently. Years later, my mom and I were sitting together at Tufts, enjoying a beautiful day on campus together. As we sat on campus together on this cool Friday afternoon, we both experienced such a huge feeling of relief. After the long two-year journey that I had taken on following my graduation from the University of Delaware, I finally knew where I would be taking the next steps in my professional journey and it was exactly where I wanted and needed to be.