Wait List Alert
apparently a lot of people want to go to community acupuncture school this year
Well, this is a surprise. As of June 1, ORCCA has received more than enough applications to fill up our incoming class of future community acupuncturists. This means that in the next few weeks, we’ll be starting our first-ever wait list for Cohort 13 I mean Pod 13. Since we’re whales now.
So we want to ask everybody who’s been accepted, and everybody who’s in the application process, to read this post. We want to be sure that everybody who enrolls really, really wants to be here. We try hard to do that regardless, and sometimes you just can’t know until you’re in the program whether it’s the right fit. But now that we have more people who want to be here than we can accommodate, we’re feeling a different kind of urgency.
We want to make sure that everybody’s clear on what the school can offer you, versus what you need to show up with.
Basically, we can train you to do the thing that we do: low-barrier, high-volume, trauma-informed acupuncture. But you need to show up with your own motivation, perseverance, follow-through and self-discipline — in order to get through the program, and to pass the credentialing exams after graduation.
We say this a lot in the first module, but we realized we need to say it before enrollment as well: if you need somebody else to motivate you or to make sure you do your work, acupuncture is absolutely the wrong field to get into. Because acupuncture is a profession made up almost entirely of small businesses and self-employed people, it has nothing to offer you if you’re not self-motivated and self-responsible. You should expect to create your own job, one way or another.
To quote recent graduate Arielle of Common Good Acupuncture:
The experience that ORCCA grads get in student clinic is INDISPENSABLE. We go through every part of doing the job and that creates a muscle memory. It’s one thing to read about something but it’s a completely other thing to have it in your body because you’ve been doing it…
The school can give you the experience of systems that work to run a clinic, but it can’t make it happen for you. What attracted me to the program was that it was clear that I had to be self-motivated and self-responsible. I knew that from the admissions materials and it was hammered into us as students early-on, which is different than most other educational experiences I have had — it’s not codependent.
My experience with opening my clinic has just been more of the same. In small business, you’re accountable to yourself. There’s nobody looking over my shoulder, saying, “Now remember you have to switch your Con Edison account from your personal one to your business” or any of the other thousand little tasks. The biggest challenge is showing up for myself and keeping the energy up, especially on slow days.
We recommend you read the whole post, along with Arielle’s memoir that describes all the DIY aspects of the school:
Also, the ORCCA program is hard! It requires hours and hours of consistent study outside of class time — which is also what’s required to get through the NCBAHM exams afterward. If you struggle with self-discipline and time management, you’ll struggle to get licensed and have a practice.
The program is far from ideal, partly because ORCCA runs on a shoestring and partly because we’re explicitly not trying to offer an ideal acupuncture school experience. Our goal is to help students get familiar with the conditions of small business: imperfection, uncertainty, and the discomfort of putting yourself out there. It’s as close to an apprenticeship in acupuncture small business as we can get, in a state that doesn’t allow acupuncture apprenticeships.
Please read this post too:
Ultimately, ORCCA is accountable to our patients and our community — not least because that’s where the funding for our school originally came from. We want to train future acupunks who can succeed in the program so that they’ll be able to take care of real people afterwards. So many communities need this!
We want people who want to do the thing. Please double-check and confirm that’s you.