My work’s purpose, as an allied health professional and a researcher, is to support people to develop flourishing lives, doing what matters to them. I aim at doing work that increases mental health and wellbeing from individuals to wider populations. I envision our health system shifting from struggling to manage illness and crises into facilitating healthy development. A key challenge is to implement health services that have capacity to give people the right help at the right time. This is the future my career is serving, and the purpose underlying my day-to-day work.
During my undergraduate occupational therapy training in Helsinki, I identified two key words to guide my career development: “mental health” and “research”. My drive to learn and keep pushing myself beyond comfort zones has led me to move countries and regions. During my pre-doctoral years, I grew into a person-centred practitioner, taught next generations of occupational therapists, contributed to interdisciplinary research capacity-building and developed skills and knowledge in qualitative research and evidence synthesis. My doctoral research builds on this foundation when I learn to apply mixed methods and explore mental health support opportunities within primary care, in everyday family lives and nationally.
My career as a therapist in research so far has developed through big leaps to the unknown and small incremental developments in knowledge, skills and understanding. I feel hesitant to write out the specific steps I have taken and the funding sources I have accessed. These are visible in the column on the right. This is not to diminish the value of funding and movement from ideas to outcomes – I am grateful of the support I have received so far, and look at my early career CV as evidence of my potential to do meaningful things in the world through research and practice leadership. However, it is the spaces between CV lines where career-building happens. A CV shows success – and for most of us, myself included, that develops through failures and persistence.
Allied health practice is a strong foundation for research that can translate into meaningful impact. Furthermore, carving a research career path is an endless resource of continuous professional development. We enter a road towards making good changes happen in the world, and end up changing ourselves along the journey.
“I would recommend anyone holding similar dreams to get their foot on that path as soon as possible: talk to people, keep thinking, shape your vision of what you want to do, be and become. Early steps are not easy but with the right supervisors, mentors and peers the journey is not a lonely one.”