I found out that if I stay full-time, I will be seeing clients in about a year.
This is how the program works:
- You do your course of study and then when you finish all your prerequisites, you start your practicum at one of the sponsoring organizations. I thought this meant that you’d be shadowing someone at a clinic but actually it means that you start building your client caseload. The practicum is about 7 hours a week on-site, which translates to about 3 or 4 direct contact with clients and 3 or 4 record-keeping, staff meetings, etc. That’s one semester.
- Then for the next three semesters you do about 15 hours of clinical internship, which is about 7 or 8 client hours and about 7 or 8 indirect work for clients. During your practicum and internship (usually taken at the same place), you are supervised by your supervisor and then you also come back to school to discuss your clients within a group setting.
- At the end of this you graduate and immediately take your PC (professional counseling) exam and your PCC (professional clinical counseling) exam. However you cannot be a PCC until you have 3,000 supervised hours working with clients.
- With your PC, you can see clients but you need to have one hour supervised time per every 10 hours of direct client contact. You can get this supervision either within a program setting (like working with a clinic) or you can hang out your shingle and see clients on your own and then hire someone to supervise you.
- Those 3,000 supervised hours equal about two years of full-time counseling practice. I’m a little unclear about the paperwork around this but you come out of those 3,000 hour with a PCC and then you have the same rights and responsibilities as a psychologist (PhD) or a LCSW. (In Ohio you can’t get your LCSW unless you have a MSW although that wasn’t always true and have a friend with a bachelors who has her LCSW.) Except for being able to write prescriptions, you have the same rights and responsibilities as a psychiatrist, too. My understanding though is that we can’t have people committed involuntarily and the other folks can. But you can diagnose people, you can create treatment plans, you can take insurance and you can have a counseling practice.
I’m hoping to crank through full-time but we’ll see. Life has a way of being unpredictable. But I am excited about how quickly we are able to get into the field (ok, nervous, too, of course). I’m going to be looking for a program that works with children and their parents, hopefully somehow related to adoption and/or fostercare.
Seeing as how I will be out there seeing clients in about a year, I am dismantling my archives post-haste.
Two things about my blog today:
- I will never host a major giveaway again. I had no idea there was a giveaway attached to the $200 Just My Size shopping spree when I signed up — I just wanted to do something fun with Pennie. But the giveaway has been a wreck of comment moderation and I’m unlikely to know the person who wins because it’s been over 400 random strangers (the vast majority of which won’t become readers). And the influx of traffic doesn’t happen on a page with ads (because BlogHer won’t let you run their ads on giveaway pages) so it hasn’t even been good for my stats. Today is the last day of the giveaway and as soon as I announce the winner, I am taking that page DOWN.
- Speaking of taking things down, I’m going to start removing my deep, dark archives. I am a little sad about this but only in theory. In reality I don’t care much and in two years time if I’m counseling people, I don’t want to be so easily stalked.
Two things about my kids:
- Madison just hosted her first sleepover with Abby‘s youngest. Movies were watched, snacks were eaten, giggling was done in great quantities. Sasuke (guinea pig) woke them up at 8:30am, which is around Madison’s usual time but I have a feeling Maya is gonna be feeling it later today. Madison, too, actually. I don’t think they fell asleep until about 11pm. They slept at either end of the twin bed and it was pretty cute. I meant to snap a picture but they woke up before I remembered I meant to do that.
- Noah is a great semi-brother to Roscoe. They adore each other. I was thinking about how fun it is to see Noah with a baby and how nice it is to see him with a baby who does not live here so I don’t have to be waking up in the middle of the night with said adorable baby. But as mother’s of teen boys know, there is nothing more heartwarming than seeing a teen boy play peek-a-boo with a chortling almost one year old.
Two things about school:
- I have my first paper (it’s not much of a paper) due on Thursday and should probably write, that, eh? And also I have to give a presentation for a reading also on Thursday but my books aren’t here yet. My first meeting of my other class is tonight and my seminar is this weekend. I found out I have to go to court as an observer for the seminar.
- Transportation to my classes is quickly becoming a challenge and we may need to buy a second very used car. We’re going to crunch the numbers this weekend, I think.
Two things about the state of my mind:
- A friend of mine asked me to present at an upcoming open adoption conference and I thought it was in the next month. She emailed me to say they’d moved the dates up a week and I thought, my god! And they haven’t even sent out a call for proposals! They must be really confident! So I wrote her saying something to that effect and she said, “Well, we have a whole year…” You can either use this story to judge my state of mind as someone who is that confused about the dates or you can use it to imagine my state of mind now that this particular worry is off my plate!
- Despite the weather being back up in the 90s, having a headache because of the humidity, being worried about my books arriving in time and having a broken kitchen sink (long story) I am enormously cheerful because I’ve started school. I’m looking forward to tonight’s class because I believe it’s an overview of the program, the internship and the licensing process. I have a lot of questions about all of that and am looking forward to having them answered.
It was good. It was long (from 4:30 to 9:15) but it was good. I like both my professors and I’m impressed with the diversity (age, race, background, interests) of my classmates. There is going to be a lot of discussions in the classes and not as much formal writing as I expected. (I still have two more classes I’m taking but one is an orientation class — more about the process of becoming licensed, I think — and one is a seminar so likely not as much formal writing there either.) I’m sure this might not be true of the whole program but at least in these two classes, most of the writing we’ll be doing are overviews of what we’re reading to bring to class in order to discuss them. There are a couple of papers but they’re not research papers and there’s one individual project that the professor didn’t get to explain last night. She gave us a rubric about it but I haven’t really looked at it yet. She said it wouldn’t make sense anyway until she could show us an example and I’m thinking it must be a presentation of some kind because she couldn’t show us ‘cuz the computer was ganked.
On the one hand, I was hoping for more writing. On the other hand, I’m relieved because I have an awful lot of writing to do in the rest of my life. I also like class discussions especially with a group with so many varying points of view. And in our second class we are broken up into teams and I like my other team members even though or because we are all pretty different people.
Other bullet points about class last night:
- No one else had an iPad, which I didn’t expect.
- In fact, no one else brought any kind of computing device, which I really didn’t expect. I doubt I’ll take many notes for the second class though — it’s mostly discussion.
- Both my teachers are funny. They are also working counselors with a lot of experience in counseling. (This wasn’t true at OSU.) This I like.
- I dumped my dinner on my lap during break. This is typical of me. Luckily it was just California Rolls so other than a little soy sauce on my skirt, it was ok.
- I was not the oldest person in my classes but I was among the older students.
- I out-ed myself as a homeschooling mother right away because we had to go around the room in both groups and talk about ourselves. I figured with all of this discussion it’d come out sooner or later so why not just make the leap. One professor expressed sympathy ‘cuz he thought it sounded stressful. The other one asked a lot of questions because she thinks unschooling sounds fascinating.
- I have both classes in the same room. Very convenient.
- The program is definitely geared to working students and most of my classmates are going part-time and taking advantage of the flexibility. Even though I’m hoping to crank through the program, it’s nice to know that if life interferes that I’ll be able to rethink that strategy. Also speaking of diversity, one of my classmates is a welder, one is a wellness consultant, one is a prison guard and one is a stay-at-home dad. That’s just to give you an idea. Oh and most of my classmates are women. Out of everyone in both classes, only three are guys. That’s not so diverse, I know. That ratio was true at OSU from what I saw, too.
The coursework is definitely going to be interesting. I had a moment’s fleeting sadness about the hard-core academia at OSU that I am missing but then came to my senses because I do have a life and two kids and various jobs and frankly OSU would have stretched me maybe more than I could handle. I doubt I would have come out as a homeschooling mom so quickly at OSU. I doubt that if I had, that it would have been a welcome confession. The learning here is different (not as stringently academic) but no less challenging (because it’s really about working with people who are not like you). If I’m serious about having a counseling career it’s going to be a greater benefit to me to spend time learning how to listen. Also, as far as academics go, some of that is up to me. Like one of our professors said that we need to read the whole book but we really only need to READ five chapters (because we’ll be presenting those five chapters to our group as the weeks go on). But I’m going to READ the whole book. It’s nice to know that people can skim if they need to but me, I’m not going to skim.
I am happy that at least for this semester I can keep up with my freelance stuff. I’ll still need to be careful about what I take on but I have some projects coming up and I won’t be having to get all frantic about fitting them in.
Mel Brooks in High Anxiety -- this is how I feel RIGHT NOW
Did you know I start school next week? I do! I start grad school! I’m freaking out!
I didn’t know I was freaking out and then I realized I was when I heard my teeth grinding.
How in the heck am I going to do all of it??? Will I have enough time and headspace to:
- Be with my kids all day (you know, with the homeschool thing)
- Get my work done (the work I’m keeping)
- Get Support for Special Needs done
- Get grades that won’t make me ashamed
People, I am a little nervous. I am a lot nervous.
Things that will help:
- Julia has been very kind about trying to get SforSN stuff squared away so that I won’t feel as overwhelmed and arranging a regular Monday editorial phone conference
- My mom has offered to help with the kids (but she’ll be helping my sister for awhile because my sister’s car died and she’ll need a hand with kid transport.)
- (Oh shoot that reminds me of another anxiety: Just having one car. There are some tricky evenings coming up. Ack! Wait, back to the helpful list)
- It will be cooler soon. It’s hard to feel hopeful when it’s too hot to move (and it’s not as hot as it has been, mind you)
- Brett will be knocking back his weekend hours soon (he’s down to one weekend day and may go down to none, I hope)
- I only have actual classes two nights a week
- School is going to be FUN!!!!!!
- I closed out all but one client and this one client really only calls on me every couple of weeks and he never calls me with emergencies so there’s always time to do stuff and he knows I’m going to grad school and I love this client because he is so nice and always says please and thank you and PAYS ME WHEN HE SAYS HE WILL (I love him so much)
I will just have to be freaked out for a little bit.
But you want to hear something funny? Sure you do! I got a letter from the book store addressed to THE PARENTS OF DAWN FRIEDMAN
So I sent it to my mother. Let her deal with it! Ha!
It’s just a little more than a week until school starts. This new beginning is making me think of the past year, which between you and me has been a lousy one. I never got to tell you about the crazy that was my last job and I never will get to. But I have worked in dysfunctional environments before and have even managed to thrive in dysfunctional environments by putting my head down and avoiding the drama. But this job? What’s that saying about lunatics running the asylum? I made the decision to quit after I got targeted in a mess that was clearly about control and then I spent the next two weeks watching things unravel. The entire time I was in a panic. I quit my job — my job with direct deposit and friendly co-workers — for this????
I was a wreck. I was high on adrenaline for a little bit because hysteria (even other people’s hysteria) will do that to me. Also I knew I was right to quit. (Here’s a thing — when Brett first got laid off and I was full-time freelancing? I would have talked myself into staying because I didn’t have an appreciation for my professional self-worth. Quitting that job when I did was one of my proudest moments.)
Fortunately the freelance work that disappeared (the disappearance of which sent me to work at an office for the first time in 13 years), has been coming back so, I’ve been able to make ends meet even though I came home to absolutely no clients in my portfolio. That was scary. But we figured it out. I could see my fellow freelancers were getting work again and that laid off folks were getting new jobs. I was scared (well, terrified) but I also knew what I was doing so gearing things back up wasn’t as hard as it was the first time around.
Then this summer when I officially got into grad school, I started letting clients go and turning away work. I’m planning on letting grad school take over my brain but I know that I’ll be continuing with Support for Special Needs and this one client I absolutely adore and if I can manage it, I hope to do some one-off jobs. But I let go of my normal marketing efforts (blessed relief, that!) and put that time into Support for Special Needs. Brett took a weekend job to make up for my lack of work and that has been hard on all of us. He’ll be able to quit once school starts because I’m getting enough aid to cover my lost wages. The way I see it, freelancing full-time and going to school part-time and homeschooling full time is a recipe for crazy-making but putting school ahead of work will let me keep my sanity and not cost me anymore in the long-run. I want to crank through school and get to the other side because I am really pretty damn excited to get to the other side.
But this year? This past year has sucked. It’s been a lot of fear and a lot of feelings of failure. Turning forty at a job I didn’t love and quitting that for a job full of crazy — ugh. Then spouse working seven days a week while the house slowly disintegrates around my ears — double ugh.
I’m ready for some good times, let me tell you. I’m ready for some REWARD for all the hard work and sleepless nights and panic attacks. I am ready to start looking forward again. I may be naive but I think school is it. As worried as I am about the work load, I’m so excited to start. Lots of reading, lots of writing and lots of over-thinking? I cannot wait, people. I can. not. wait.
