Nina P., OTR/L

About Nina

Nina is the newest mentor in the program — one year into her first travel contract — and that's exactly why she's here. When she was preparing to leave her permanent pediatric OT position in Seattle, she couldn't find anyone who was currently going through the first-year experience. Everyone she could talk to was three, four, five years out. Their advice was good, but the emotional rawness of year one had faded from memory.

"I wanted to talk to someone who was scared last month," she says. "Not someone who had figured it all out years ago. I'm that person right now, and I want to be that person for someone else."

Nina works in pediatric and school-based OT — a specialty that brings its own set of travel challenges, including year-round vs. school-year contract timing, licensure lead time for state education departments, and the emotional weight of working with children while you yourself are far from your own community. She navigates all of this in real time and shares what she's learning openly.

How Nina Mentors

Nina is best for travelers who are:

• About to take their first contract and scared — she gets it, she's been there recently
• Dealing with the emotional side of leaving home, friends, and routine
• OTs considering pediatric or school-based travel specifically
• Therapists who want someone to process the experience with, not just get tactical advice

The Emotional Side Nobody Talks About

Most travel therapy content is financial. Pay packages, stipends, tax homes — useful, but incomplete. Nina fills a gap that most mentors (reasonably) can no longer fill because the freshness has worn off. She talks about the loneliness of a new city, building community as a traveler, and the specific anxiety of starting at a new facility every 13 weeks and having to prove yourself all over again. She also talks about the genuine joy of it — the flexibility, the adventure, the clinical growth from seeing so many different settings and patient populations.

On Pediatric Travel OT

Nina works through an agency that has been flexible with her on school-year contract timing — an important consideration for peds OTs who don't want to be placed mid-year or in settings that don't match their pediatric background. She can speak to the specific sourcing challenges in this specialty and what to look for in an agency that actually knows the peds market.