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My name is Dr. Ellen Herlache. I am the Program Director for the Masters
of Science in Occupational Therapy Program at Saginaw Valley State University.
I've been a writer, more or less, throughout my entire life.
I've always been an avid reader, so I think the more you read, the better your writing
becomes— just my personal opinion.
But I've always been fairly good at writing—it was something I was stronger at.
So I was always able to more or less get by. I would put effort into my writing, but not
push myself to my full potential until my senior year in high school.
I took a senior composition class, and I remember I turned in my first paper
and I thought, “I'm doing good, no problems”; then I got it back
and at the bottom of the paper my teacher had written in big bold letters, “SO WHAT?”.
it was the first time I really stopped and thought about my writing.
He was challenging me; I had written this great paper and he was asking, what's the
point? What did we get out of it? What did we learn?
So he really challenged me to become a better writer and learn how to write with a purpose,
how to write with a clear intention, how to go into it with the end in mind.
So he continuously pushed me to become a better writer,
and even though I didn't really like it at the time,
I learned to appreciate it, especially once I hit college.
He had taught me how to always push for something more with my writing,
how to make sure I'm writing with a purpose. So when I did my undergraduate writing classes
at Saginaw Valley State, I had some great instructors who helped me
polish that writing, but I never forgot that big lesson of SO WHAT.
My sophomore year of college at Saginaw Valley, I was hired to start working as a mentor in
the Writing Center, and through my experiences of being a mentor,
I really got to start to solidify my own writing skills,
because rather than just being asked to write for myself—and do what I was used to doing—
I all of a sudden had to learn how to read someone else's paper critically,
get a feel for what constitutes good writing or not good writing,
and be able to explain that to someone who is struggling about
some changes that they should make, and what they need to make those changes.
Those skills I learned in writing throughout my undergraduate career really helped me,
when I did grad school, did the traditional grad school—
lots of papers, Master's thesis, all that kind of stuff.
But even when I wrote in my graduate program, those questions stuck with me:
So what? Why are you doing what you're doing? In 2006 I started teaching as an adjunct at
Saginaw Valley State in the Occupational Therapy program, and very
quickly I got directed toward the research curriculum.
Our program was still in its early stages. We had just started our Masters program.
Our Bachelors program had been established for a while,
but we were just moving into our Masters program, and we knew we needed to have a strong research
curriculum as part of it. So we were still in the process of figuring
out what that curriculum could look like, or should look like, and how we wanted to
structure that. So I was able to work with some great faculty
in our Occupational Therapy Department, particularly Dr. Donald Early, and I was able
to really help take an active role in shaping that research curriculum, in figuring
out what we wanted our students to do. And I really quickly discovered—more than
I ever had before—why writing mattered. I had students with phenomenal ideas for research,
with great plans for what they wanted to do, but we learned very, very quickly that if
we weren't able to communicate those ideas very clearly in writing, we were never going
to be able to implement those projects. And over the years we've had some really good
success with our students. If you go into the Health and Human Services
building, in the showcase on the right, you'll see
some of the fruits of our labor. We've had multiple publications in national
and international journals. We've had students do poster presentations
at different conferences, locally and nationally. We've had a lot of success with that and it
all comes down to writing. Students who had a great idea, who were able
to develop that idea, write it out, complete the project and communicate
it to others, are then able to take advantage of that information
and apply it to their own patients. So bottom line, no matter what you do in Occupational
Therapy, whether you become a clinician, a scholar,
an educator, or a researcher, writing is a part of all of it.