Using personal projects to enhance students' first-person understanding of occupations.

A semester-long assignment was developed to emphasize occupational therapy students' real-life, first-person experience in establishing, modifying, and sustaining occupations. The overall goal of the assignment was to help students integrate core content on occupation, habits, and client-centered intervention within the context of ongoing, lived, personal experience. By pursuing their own personal projects, occupational therapy students developed, modified, or ceased occupations in their real-life context. This opportunity for students to experience as client was successful at illuminating in a very real way, the challenges, responsibilities and obligations that they will encounter as they learn to think like a therapist.