I conducted my 2 interviews with Taylor Gantz, an Occupational Therapist, and Sharon

Solomon, a social worker, from the Pediatric Developmental Center. I chose to interview both

these people for a few reasons. I chose to interview Taylor because Occupational Therapy is

what I plan on doing in the future. Sharon’s interview was helpful overall because it gave me

more knowledge and insight about the Pediatric Developmental Center. On a regular basis,

Taylor does a lot of things. She typically does a variety of treatments and evaluations on her

patients. Although the PDC offers treatment for kids aged 0-18, she typically treats 0-12 year

olds. The reason for this is because once they start going to school, there are typically OT’s there

and they try and give parents helpful tools to work on at home. Also, she treats all kinds of

disorders but mainly sees kids with autism spectrum disorder. One other interesting thing she

does is run the NICU clinic in the main hospital. Basically, she sees babies when they are ready

to leave the NICU and evaluates if they may need special services in the future. I thought this

was interesting because I didn’t know you could evaluate someone so young. For my future, one

thing I have to do in order to be prepared for this job is to go to graduate school. Besides that

being the obvious, I think it would be really important to also get as much fieldwork hours as I

can and gain these hours from 2 or more places. When Taylor was in grad school, she did her

fieldwork hours at 3 very different locations. This helped her pick her specialty as a Pediatric

Occupational Therapist and helped her figure out what type of environment she liked the most.

Although I didn’t learn a lot of new things from my interview with Taylor, I did get a little more

information. For example, I didn’t realize that OT’s are needed in so many different places. That

was interesting because I’m still not 100% sure where I want to work. A few weeks ago, I was

actually thinking that maybe I don’t want to go the OT route, but this interview helped me

reassure myself that this is the right path for me. As for any related positions for me now, there
really are none. I’m able to observe other OT’s right now but can’t do anything more until I am

in grad school. This is how it is for the social worker position as well. In terms of relocating,

that’s a very big question that I wouldn’t be able to answer now. I would base this on grad

school, my family, and my boyfriend/husband at the time. I wouldn’t be able to just pick up and

move by myself only for a job considering I am such a homebody. As far as I know, the OT field

is a growing field and has about an 8% growth rate over the next few years. Due to that, I would

hope more locations and jobs would be available by the time I was done with grad school. As for

my interview with Sharon, I learned a lot about the PDC as a whole. I learned that we really

value ourselves as being a multidisciplinary approach team. It seems like not many places have

this approach, but the reality is that not all kids have one problem. A lot of the times, there are

multiple issues going on and being able to share results, tests, and other things within the same

practice makes things better for the doctors and clients.