You spent years learning how to write a treatment plan, and about four minutes learning what your first week actually feels like. Nobody sat you down and explained what a hiring manager is really listening for, or what happens when you walk into a room and the plan falls apart.
We asked Jordon Allard, MOT, OTR/L, who founded ASPIRE in 2020, to answer the questions new grads ask us most. Her answers are below, and the full conversation is in the video.
1. What If I Don't Know Enough Yet?
The most common mistake new grads make is not a clinical one. It is walking in believing they should already have every answer, then freezing when they do not.
You are going to meet diagnoses and treatments you have never seen. The job is not to already know them. The job is to be accountable for what you do not know, then go find it. Text a mentor. Email a former professor. Read the current research. Ask the PT who has been doing this for fifteen years.
"You have to be accountable for what you don't know and that you're still learning. But also be confident that you will figure it out."
That is the difference between new grads who grow fast and new grads who stall. Not confidence that you have the answer. Confidence that you will find it.
2. Who Should I Actually Learn From in My First Year?
Other OTs, first. They know your scope, your documentation, and your language, and they are the fastest answer when you are stuck. That is a great starting point.
Then expand the circle. Some of the most useful things you learn will come from a physical therapist, a speech-language pathologist, or a nurse who has known your patient for three years. Every discipline sees the same person through a different lens, and borrowing that lens makes you better inside your own scope.
A good workplace makes this easy, because the people around you are genuinely invested in you succeeding. If you land somewhere that feels less supportive, build the circle yourself, inside the building or outside it. At ASPIRE, PT, OT, and speech work the same buildings and the same patients, so that cross-discipline learning happens without anyone scheduling it.
3. What Happens When the Treatment Plan Falls Apart?
Most new therapists are rigid at first. You walk in planning to do A, B, C, and D, and it feels like failure when you only get through B.
That rigidity is normal. It is what school rewarded, and it comes from wanting to be safe and do things correctly. But some of your best sessions will be the ones where you set the plan down because your patient needed something else that day.
You are never only treating the person in front of you. You are treating their spouse, their kids, everyone who loves them and is quietly frightened. Making room for that is clinical work, not a detour from it.
4. What Skill Does School Underteach?
Therapeutic use of self, and it is not close.
"Therapeutic use of self is very much underrated. Being able to use it in motivating people, or explaining your why behind what your treatment is. That's such a powerful thing."
School teaches you interventions. It spends far less time on the thing that determines whether your patient ever does them. Therapeutic use of self is how you motivate someone who is exhausted and discouraged. It is how you explain the why behind a treatment so it stops feeling like a chore and starts feeling like a route back to something they want.
It is hard to grasp straight out of a program, because it does not live in a textbook. It lives in repetition. Start watching for it now, and notice how experienced clinicians talk to patients who have given up.
5. How Do I Know if a Job Is the Right Fit?
This is the one that costs people a year of their career.
Senior living is not outpatient ortho. Home health is not acute care. Each setting carries its own pace, its own documentation load, and its own expectations for how you show up in a room. A therapist who is excellent in one can be miserable in another, and that has nothing to do with skill.
Before you accept a position, ask to shadow. Any employer worth working for will say yes. At ASPIRE we ask candidates changing settings to shadow first, because senior living asks something specific of a therapist and we would rather you know that on day zero than in month three.
It helps to know what is actually being weighed when you interview. Teamwork comes first, meaning the kind of person who says you go ahead and take this one, I will get the next. It is whether you communicate clearly, because clear is kind, and clarity is what holds a team together when something goes sideways.
What Should I Do While I'm Still in Fieldwork?
If you are in the back half of level II, the whole strategy fits in three words. Say yes to everything.
If your CI offers to let you sit in on a speech session, go. If someone asks whether you want to see a part of the building you have never seen, go. You will never again have this much permission to watch and learn without a caseload of your own.
How Do I Apply?
Tell us where you are: what you are graduating into, what setting you think you want, and what you are still unsure about. Send it through our Join Us page or call 303-963-5582.
We hire OTs, PTs, and SLPs at every experience level, and new grads work alongside experienced clinicians from day one. Reach out even if you do not see a posting that matches you, and ask to shadow before you decide anything.
ASPIRE is an independent, therapist-owned practice. Our outpatient clinic is at 1371 Hecla Dr, Suite E in Louisville, and our teams serve senior living communities across the Front Range, including Boulder, Superior, Lafayette, Broomfield, Longmont, and Erie.