Julia Chooses to Join Inaugural E-OTD Cohort at UIC

This May, Julia will graduate from UIC having successfully completed her honors undergraduate program of study with a major in Psychology. Since beginning as an undergraduate research assistant at CPERL more than a year ago, Julia has designed and built readiness to undertake her capstone project, as nested within PROSPECT Aim 2, and demonstrated tenacity in conducting the work as designed. She successfully recruited, enrolled, and collected data by co-facilitating six semi-structured interviews with families, to understand and apply parent perspectives on the implementation of the YC-PEM in an early intervention service context. She has been instrumental to preparing these transcripts for analysis and for analyzing the data from families, to be including in a refereed publication that is being assembled now. She takes the stage in presenting on this work at the UIC Undergraduate Research Forum and Impact Day this month, and she is part of a CPERL team that hopes to take turns presenting on the Aim 2 work at national and international conferences this year.

Julia is our second CPERL team member to transition from undergraduate to graduate study at UIC. However, she is the first CPERL team member to join the inaugural entry-level Occupational Therapy Doctorate (OTD) cohort. The e-OTD will include membership in a Scholarship of Practice Collaborative, within which she will design and complete a doctoral capstone. Julia shares that she chose to further her education at UIC because "of the wonderful mentorship opportunities, as well as the diversity that both the UIC community and Chicago has to offer its students". Julia loved her undergraduate experience and hopes to "continue making memories and learning life-long lessons here at UIC". Congratulations, Julia!