Why Do People Become Occupational Therapists?

Posted on May 8, 2025

By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research

Occupational therapy can play an important role in helping promote the independence and integration of people with disabilities, older adults, and others. Understanding why people become occupational therapists is important to not only help guide education initiatives but also to better understand the perceptions students have entering the field. For these reasons, in this study, Dr. Laura VanPuymbrouck (Rush University) and I examined the perspectives of incoming occupational therapy students about why they entered the profession. We analyzed these data using thematic analysis.

We found several trends about why students became occupational therapists. For example, a lot of people were drawn to the fact that they perceived occupational therapy to not only be a health care profession, but also allowed them to be creative. Many also had past experiences with occupational therapy, either receiving occupational therapy themselves or seeing a family member receive occupational therapy, that made them interested in the field.

Many students also mentioned that they were interested in caring for people and helping people. While this often was well-meaning, there were a few students that were a bit patronizing without realizing it, looking down on people and expressing a bit of a savior complex. We believe these attitudes may be driven by their assumptions about clients. For example, many of the students expressed biased ideas about disability, including perceptions that were based in the medical model of disability.

“Students begin their career with established ideas of what disability is and perceptions of the roles they will have in supporting clients with disability as an occupational therapy practitioner. Many of these perceptions are shaped by societies’ biases as well as the medical model. Faculty can use the findings of this study to recognize students enter the academic world with many misperceptions, including misperceptions of living life as a person with disability, informed by the medical model and deeply embedded ableism. Using this knowledge faculty can develop targeted educational experiences focused not on ‘overcoming’ disability but instead on addressing the many social barriers that prevent people with disability from achieving their goals” (VanPuymbrouck and Friedman, 2025).

This article is a summary of the following journal manuscript: VanPuymbrouck, L., & Friedman, C. (2025). Why occupational therapy?: A qualitative analysis of incoming students’ reasons for entering the profession. Journal of Occupational Therapy Education, 9(2), https://encompass.eku.edu/jote/vol9/iss2/1.