Monday Q&A

Well, I started my Monday with an email referring to a comment left on the blog.  Cameron left this comment for me and I'm going to answer his questions in between and then get on with today's wrap up:

Greetings!
I am a current psychology undergrad very interested in school psychology. Let me say that your blog has been amazing to read. I have just finished going through all of your posts and you have provided a wealth of information and reinforced my interest in this career path.

Thank you, Cameron, those a very kind words, although I personally think "amazing" is a bit strong.  As for being a psychology undergrad, take my advice: stay in school.  I deluded myself into thinking I was going to make a livable wage, right out of college, with a BA in psychology by working in mental health.

I just have a couple of questions regarding the field.

- I was wondering exactly what the counseling you do entails. I know you have stated that it is not psychotherapy but you haven't quite specified what it is.

The way I talk about counseling in my blog may be a bit on the side of dissuading the lay person away from the idea that I'm sitting in a room with a student saying, "Tell me about your mother" in my best Viennese accent and it may be more like what counseling is today.  It is more focused and goal oriented as opposed to what may be done in private practice.  That is because IEPs must have counseling goals which are objective and measurable.  In addition, you may be more focused on school behaviors but it is naive to think that school and home are separate.

I will say that counseling is not my strongest suit and isn't the part of psychology that I most enjoy, perhaps because it isn't my strongest suit.  Part of that is likely due to the fact that it was an area of my training that was a little light.  You have to keep in mind that, in New Jersey, most school psychologists have post-Masters degrees called Ed. S.  So you only have so much course work you can squeeze in there before the program should really be called a Psy. D. or Ph. D.  You have all the diagnostic classes and other stuff that is required.  I took basic counseling classes (the ones focused practicing active listening, reframing, reflecting) and basic classes on counseling theories (family therapy, etc) but I have not been indoctrinated into one particular style of counseling, like I would get if I attended the Psy D. program at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine which does a bang-up job in CBT.

- What are some of the differences in dealing with the different age groups and which do you prefer.

I haven't worked with a lot of younger, younger kids, such as pre-K to 2nd grade.  My experience has largely been with 13 or 14 year olds and up.  My previous career dealt with adults.  So I'm more comfortable with the older students which may be more due to familiarity than anything else.  I do like being able to have more full conversations (and the older kids may even laugh at my jokes).  Some of my colleagues that have been in the field longer have said that you work more with the parents and teachers when dealing with younger students and more directly with the older students.  So if you like having direct client contact (it is hard for me to get out of using the old mental health lingo) then you should aim for working with older students.

- Does your years of experience in psychotherapy before school psychology come in handy or is it a completely different ball game.

My previous experience was working for non-profit behavioral healthcare.  My first job was as a residence counselor in an adult psychiatric group home and I moved into psychiatric outreach, as well as having done a stint as a mental health screener for psychiatric emergency services.  I've done drug counseling, vocational counseling, worked with medication managements, and been to some of the least hygenic places on the face of New Jersey.  I would say that it has both helped and is a completely different ball game.




How has it helped: it has really helped keep things in perspective.  When I have had a rough day at the school and gotten my butt chewed out by a teacher or parent (which hasn't happened all that much, knock on wood) or the red tape of the school setting has been tough, I just think to myself, "Well, I'm not riding in an elevator that smells like I'm breathing in tuberculosis" or "I haven't gotten choked by the crack-head boyfriend of one of my clients" or "No one has thrown bricks at me today."  When you look at it from that perspective, everything is just rosy.  In addition, my experience with the extremes of human behavior has also made me fairly unflappable so I remain calm in situations that others might panic or become agitated and I've developed a helluva poker face (do not insert Lady Ga Ga music).



On the other hand, the school setting is a different world that has its own rules, both socially and legally, and when you enter it for the first, you are ripe for the picking.  You really need to be able to say, "I'll get back to you" if you feel you might be being taken advantage of or when you are uncertain of what is going on.  But on the plus side, the behavioral healthcare setting has a long standing tradition of "trial by fire" and people that have survived in that setting can get used to a lot of stuff pretty quickly.

- And finally, from the research I have done I see it looks like the demographics in school psychology strongly lean towards women. Does this make a big difference or have you faced any problems with this in your career.

I don't know what it is like in your undergrad classes but I remember my undergrad classes in psychology and I was one of the few men then too, and that was 20 years ago.  Women have dominated education for a long time.  At one point, you would have found many more male school psychologists because it was almost considered an administrative position.  That being said, I have been a minority for my entire career: I was one of the few males working in a group home, on the psychiatric outreach team, and on the child study team.  It has not been a problem for me at all.  In some ways, it may even be a plus since you are a rarity and male students may be more comfortable meeting with you, just as female students may be less comfortable meeting with you.

Again I really enjoy the blog and if you could answer any of these questions I would greatly appreciate. Also any insight on the steps to becoming or tips you could give me would be great.

Thanks Again
Cameron

 Thanks again for the kind words.  As for tips, it really is an individual experience.  I have had a varied career that has served me well but that doesn't mean that the coworkers that have gone from undergrad straight to grad school and then into a school district are any less competent than me.  I just have more stories and after some years in the work force you get those yourself.  Looking back on how I got here, I wouldn't change anything that I did.

The only thing that I'm reminded of is this story: I went back for my masters in 1997 and I finished the masters by December of 1998.  It wasn't until 2002 that I went back for school psychology.  So it is December of 1998 and I'm in the last few days of the semester and I was talking with a classmate about graduation.  She asks me if I'm planning on going for my certificate in school psychology.  At this point, I had never even heard of school psychology and I was thinking of staying in the behavioral healthcare arena forever.  So I say, "Nah, I think I'm done for now."

So lets jump ahead to my Cognitive Assessment class and who should be the assistant for the class?  Yep, the same woman that asked me that.  She had gone on to get her certificate in school psych and now she was helping to teach the class.

I still got to where she was (not the assistant thing, the school psych thing), I just took a different route to get there.  And the crazy stuff that I saw in the meantime is enough to bore people for years.

Now onto Monday!

I get into work, check my email, type up some stuff in response to said emails, and head off to my school.  My plan is to finish getting my IEPs out, get this danged FM system out of my hands, finish scheduling some incoming students, and try to tie up some loose ends before my personal day on Tuesday (my son starts preschool; add proud parent emoticon).

So I get to the school and pull out the FM system.  I call the student and a teacher down to the classroom and we go over his FM system.  The kid has had it for several years so he knows far more about its function than either the special ed teacher or I.  In the end, I can't give it to him yet because it hasn't been charged yet and I can't find some of the pieces.  The student returns to his class and I frantically search for the rest of the pieces and I'm lucky enough to find them.  I then set it to charge and mentally remind myself to lock the door to my office whenever I leave because the last thing I need is for a $2500 piece of equipment to take a walk on me.

I finish organizing my the IEPs for the teachers and send out an email to let them know I'm in the building.  I also begin typing the IEP for the new entrant, particularly the summaries from the previous evaluations while wishing I had access to a good scanner with OCR software.

Around 10:30, I go to a classroom to observe.  It is a resource class with 4 students.  They are doing an activity where they have to act out vocabulary words.  Since the other three have to guess the word, I'm chosen as the "volunteer" when they need someone to act the word out.  I leave to attend a meeting with the principal which I find out has to be rescheduled because the principal had to attend another meeting.

It is getting close to lunch and I'm getting ready to go out and get something to eat when one of the teachers comes in to get their IEPs.  Once that is done, I get my lunch and eat with my coworkers back at the CST office.  Then it is back to the school.

I'm doing some work and the chest pain that I've been experiencing becomes more consistent and aching.  While I'm fairly certain that it is due to swinging my son around the other day and I'm not experiencing any of the other symptoms related to a heart attack, I really can't afford to be too careless with my health so I go see the nurse.  I find that she isn't in her office and I can't find her.  So I close up shop and go back to the home office because the transition coordinator is an RN too, and if I can't find her, I'm a short walk away from the high school which has two nurses.  The transition coordinator has left for the day so I head over to the high school and get my vitals checked out.  I'm more anxious over the prospect of having to go to the ER for a bogus heart attack scare than I am of actually having a heart attack.  My vitals are normal and the nurses agree that it is likely due to pulled muscles, although my office mate says that it is probably stress related.  This stress is not work related.

At this point, it is too late in the day to return to the school.  So I manage to schedule two students, one of which is due to start tomorrow, over the phone with the school secretary.  When the end of the day comes, I feel comfortable that I've managed to settle things for my day off.

I'll be back on Wednesday.