Getting Organized

My Media Project Experience

At the beginning of this media project, I was assigned an empty ketchup bottle to use as my intervention for someone with secondary-progressive multiple sclerosis (MS). At first, I had no idea what to do; I brainstormed many ideas but could not think of anything meaningful. I finally thought of the idea of making a home-made “check off” list to help with fine-motor coordination and executive functioning skills.

I thought coming up with a meaningful intervention with common household items was very useful and significant. Many times, people cannot afford to buy certain equipment to aid in recovery. Just like with my home made “check off” list, a person can use common household items to build interventions to address specific deficits. Luckily, with the internet, it is easy to “google” ideas/interventions and find cheaper resources/activities.

During this project, I learned that simple materials can be made into interventions that address multiple deficits. As stated before, as I was starting this project, I had no idea what to do with an empty ketchup bottle. In the therapy world, it is easy to only think of interventions using expensive, "rehab" equipment like an arm bike or thera-bands. The ketchup bottle seemed trivial and almost impossible to make into a meaningful intervention, especially for someone with MS. However, this project made me “dig deep” and really use my creative thinking skills. I am especially thankful for this project because it is the first time during occupational therapy school that required me to use my creativity skills to create an intervention that would prove meaningful to a client.

This project has helped me learn to stay open-minded. As a future occupational therapist, there will be many times when I will have to adapt and modify treatment according to the materials/equipment available. This project has taught me that even the most random objects can be turned into something very useful with a little open-mindedness and creativity.

In the future, hopefully I will be able to use other common household items to create meaningful interventions. It saddens me to see people not progress simply because of limited financial resources. This assignment helped me “open my creativity channel,” so hopefully I can carry that with me throughout my career. I am particularly interested in serving people with limited resources, so this was the perfect project to get my mind thinking. I am excited to start fieldwork to see how we can use random objects as interventions, just like this assignment required.