Christine Kay Urish

I attribute my success to my single mother, who was very determined that I be able to stand on my own two feet, complete my education, and be able to take care of myself. I owe a lot to my mother, and since she was a single parent, I also owe a lot to her parents, because they were very influential in my life. My grandfather only had an 8th grade education, but he was a very successful insurance salesperson and had his own insurance agency. He really instilled in me that, Christine, there is nothing that you can't do. If you want it bad enough, you will figure out how to make it work. You will figure out how to do it. I've also met some amazing mentors along the way - my PhD mentor, my master's thesis mentor. I've been blessed with some amazing mentors in my life. So I would say family, mentors, and my faith.

I would say don't let anything stop you. If you really want to be in higher education and you really want to be an occupational therapy educator, or just be an educator, period, avail yourself to opportunities, no matter how small, to gain experience. If students say to me they'd like to teach at some point in time, I tell them to go give an in-service in the community, offer to be a guest lecturer at a university, do things and network. My students always laugh and say, is there anyone you don't know? I'm not scared to go and talk to people, so you have to put yourself out there. Have I always been this way? Oh, heck no. But you have to get out there, and you have to put yourself in front of people. That may be scary, and that may be uncomfortable, but you have to do it. Networking is king, or queen, or however you want to say it. You have to get out there and put yourself in front of people.

The biggest opportunity in my field right now is definitely recruiting students and making people aware of what occupational therapy is and what we do. This generation that is college age, there are a smaller number of them, so we're all battling for a smaller number of students to go to college. Most people don't know what occupational therapy is. They say, oh, you're gonna find people jobs, and I'm like, yeah, that's really a narrow part of what I do. We help people with the skills for the job of living, so if a person has an injury or an illness and is unable to do the daily activities - self-care, work, leisure - that they want to be able to do, occupational therapists help either rehabilitate them or help them be able to do the activity maybe in a different way or use some adaptive equipment. People know what physical therapy is, people know what nursing is and medicine, but they just don't know what occupational therapy is. Another big opportunity is continuing to advocate for services that are needed. With cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, people need to receive care, so we need to continue advocating for services that are needed for individuals who could benefit from them.

The values that are most important to me are honesty, integrity, compassion, and faithfulness. These are important to me in both work and home. One thing I try to instill in my students is that I'm giving them an education, but at the end of the day, what I really want them to be is a good person. If I educate a student but at the end of their graduation I have to carry them across the stage because they're so beat down, then I have failed. I need to make sure that they are well-rounded as an individual, not just as an occupational therapy practitioner, but as a person.