A dispatch from the other side!
You may have noticed that this blog has gone neglected for…quite some time. As they say, life happened since my last post. A lot of life.
And then came a highly lethal global pandemic!
Yeah. So, my graduate school experience did not go exactly as planned. However, I am scheduled to graduate next week. I honestly cannot believe that as I write the words.
I wanted to catch you all up on what I’ve been doing, how grad school went, and what I’ve learned now that I’m thiiiiiisclose to my degree posting. The long story short is, I would make all the same decisions over again. Which, in my mind, means things turned out pretty great.
The Rest of my Grad School Experience
The last time I wrote about What Grad School is Really Like, I had just finished my first semester. That…literally feels like an entire lifetime ago. I’m going to write more extensive posts that will go into more detail on all the separate pieces, but let’s just do a quick summary.
The rest of my classes at CSUN were hit-or-miss (mostly hit) in terms of professors and how helpful the classes felt. Bottom line, I still think CSUN has one of the very best MFT programs in the state. No program is going to have uniformly fantastic professors, and some classes weren’t going to appeal to me no matter who was teaching (I’m looking at you, Group Therapy). I will be graduating with a 4.0, so I was able to handle the academics just fine. I was able to keep up with the workload and finish my academic classes on time with the rest of my cohort (finished at the end of December 2019).
Where things went off the rails for me was in fieldwork (also called practicum), which is collecting client hours. Because CSUN’s is a COAMFTE-accredited program, I needed to collect 500 hours total, and at least 200 needed to be “relational,” which means there’s more than one person in the room for therapy and they have to be in a “relational” system. So, couples and families totally count, but individual children don’t. Which is crazy, because the BBS allows you to count individual child hours for the state’s couple/family/child hour requirement.
I always knew this was gonna be tough, especially considering the fieldwork placement I really wanted—the Southern California Counseling Center (SCCC). This site does offer trainees the opportunity to work with couples and families, but only after entering into the Family Skills training program, which generally doesn’t happen until the second year of training. So I started CSUN in Fall 2017 and was supposed to graduate in December 2019. But I couldn’t start collecting my relational hours at SCCC until Fall 2019. I figured I would knock out all my individual hours first, then try really hard to hit 200 relational hours in Fall 2019 to stay on track. Worst case scenario, I would do an extra semester and graduate in Spring 2020.
However, life. I had to take some time off from seeing clients because I was trying to juggle too much between school, work, and clients, so I definitely wasn’t ready in December 2019. So going into January 2020, I already knew I was going to be cutting it close, but with a lot of hustling I figured I would be able to graduate in spring.
Then…pandemic.
As you can imagine, this exploded the grad school experiences of literally every MFT student in the country. Some sites were able to switch over to Telehealth (doing therapy online) relatively quickly, but other sites (particularly public school sites) were shut down completely. For my part, I wasn’t able to start collecting the rest of my relational hours until November 2020. I finally finished in April 2021, which is why I will finally be graduating this week (even though I was done with academic classes in December 2019).
I share all this to emphasize that, as we all know, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. I totally understand if you decide to take on graduate school with an ambitious timeline and not a lot of wiggle room, but I encourage you to hold some space for life to happen.
Ultimately, this detour was a great thing for me. During all of this, I was also working on my “culminating experience” for CSUN—students can choose either comps (comprehensive exam), a thesis, or a project, and I chose a project. This involved a literature review that supported the development of a project. I’ll write a more detailed post about this whole thing later on, but for now, the takeaway is that the extra year I was enrolled in the program gave me an extra year to work on my project and make sure it was exactly what I wanted to turn in. Because I didn’t have to cut any corners to turn it in on time, it ended up being something I was really proud of and I already have a really amazing post-graduation opportunity because of it. So, if things don’t go exactly as you plan in your grad school experience (or life), don't despair—sometimes the alternative route ends up being better than what you imagined.
Where I’m Going Next
One of the things I did during my MFT program was start a podcast. This was a totally extracurricular thing that I started up with a friend of mine, Ben Fineman, who was attending a different MFT program. He came up with this great idea for a podcast one day, and we just decided to do it. I honestly thought it was just gonna be me and Ben getting together and freestyling into a microphone a couple times a month instead of going to lunch and just talking to each other about therapy stuff. However, it developed a life of its own and turned into a part-time, very unpaid job. That’s part of the life that happened that made juggling school, work (like, real paid work), and clients impossible for a bit there.
I don’t regret it for a second though, because we started making contacts in the field through the podcast that we NEVER would have made otherwise. I mean, we literally would sit around and ask each other, “who would you give anything to talk to?” and then we’d reach out and try to get them on the show. Almost every single one said yes, and then we continued having conversations with all of them after they came on the show. It was through these relationships that both Ben and I ended up getting some ridiculously cool job offers for after we graduated.
One thing I started doing towards the end of my time at CSUN was working closely with our program director, Diane Gehart, to develop her own classes for clinicians outside of the graduate program. I’ve been using what I learned creating my websites and blogs to help her set up her classes, market them, and develop an online community of clinicians. Through doing this, I realized how much I loved working with therapists, not just clients!
Another thing I can’t talk about quite yet is this cool opportunity that came from my final project. That should be developing over the summer, and it will feed my passion for helping therapists with marketing their services in a way that doesn’t feel icky.
Another thing I’ll be working on is helping Tony Rousmaniere and Alex Vaz develop the Sentio Institute, a free resource for clinicians interested in the future of the field of psychotherapy, specifically how deliberate practice can help us become the best possible clinicians we can be. Part of that is going to include some content here on this blog, and I’ll also be launching their YouTube channel! I’m going to start by turning some of my blogs posts here into videos—if you’ve found the stuff I share here valuable, I’d love to get your feedback on those once they’re up.
The one thing that I won’t be doing in the near future is seeing clients, unfortunately. I was REALLY lucky and had an associateship with the coolest supervisor of all time (Curt Widhalm, host of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast) lined up for after graduation. However, with all of the stuff I just talked about above going on, I was not going to be able to make private practice my career priority right now, which isn’t fair to a supervisor. I’m looking forward to getting back to seeing clients, earning the rest of my hours so I can finally get licensed at some point, but it’s going to be a bit before I’m able to do that.
So that’s what life looks like for me right now. I assure you, my path is NOT NORMAL. And I’m not even talking about pandemics. I have several colleagues who graduated on time and have gone right into employment as Associate MFTs, seeing clients either in private practice or community agency settings (or both!). A couple are even VERY CLOSE to being fully licensed! But that brings me to…
What I’ve Learned
No matter what you’re looking for, you’ll be able to find it and/or achieve it. This is a doable process, even for a middle-aged career switcher, even when life happens, even during a pandemic. I wouldn’t change anything that I’ve done or the choices I’ve made. I’ve also learned that this career path is very much a “you get out what you put in” sort of thing. Which has been such a pleasant switch from my previous life in the entertainment industry, where you can throw everything you’ve got at your goals and there’s only a minuscule chance you’ll get to do the things you want to do.
More than ever before, I’m a total evangelist for the career path of psychotherapy. If you’re thinking about taking this journey, I hope I’m able to help a little bit!
