Only a Couple of Weeks!

Only a couple of weeks until I officially start my internship! I am very excited and nervous at the same time. Typically I hate being nervous but since I have spent the last two years of my life studying for this experience I am willing to endure it for a couple of weeks!

As I sit down to write this first blog entry I have already turned in my resignation letter for my current job. I am working as a Department Assistant in Alumni Relations at DePaul and unfortunately I can't be working there full time while interning full time. I'm not leaving until November 1st but I am already sad about it. This work environment has been very supportive and comfortable. I am nervous about my new school and the support I will have as an intern from the staff. However, I think my supervisor is going to do a great job at not holding my hand through everything. I always learn best from just diving in, in fact that is how I learned how to swim, someone just threw me in! Ok, clearly not without floaties and someone there to help, but you get the gist.

I will write in a later post about my past experience interning as a School Counselor in college but I am hoping to learn from the many mistakes I made. I also have the great privilege to be the daughter of a middle school Principal and the friend of many great teachers, I hope all can help provide me with insight of their views of the school counselor roles and expectations.

Preparation includes reading over my Brief Counseling for School Counselor's book, trying to absorb as many pointers as possible. As a new intern I anticipate my counseling style to be an experiment since I have learned so many in theory and very few in practice. Thankfully, I have had great professors who have done as much as they can to prepare us for the unknowns in our jobs. I am thankful for their support!

I also feel very lucky to be a part of the school counseling field right now. There are so many opportunities to network with other professional school counselors on other blogs, twitter, and ASCA. I have been reading over www.schcounselor.com as much as possible. She has wonderful insights into the field and as an intern it is so great to have suggestions for interventions and a place to discuss what works and does not work. She even orchestrated a school counselor tweet chat, I was not able to participate, but the transcript is great! Fellow interns I recommend checking her stuff out.

I feel so ready to start my internship and having the support of family and friends is wonderful! Life is about to get crazy while I try and balance a full time job, internship hours and training for the Chicago Marathon but I am ready!