scaring off students
So, a high school student attended my class last night. She has to "shadow" someone in the field that she thinks she'd like to go into. First, she really seemed to struggle with my insistence that no, she CANNOT observe a therapy session. I tried to explain and said: "Well, look...how would you feel if you went to talk to a therapist and someone else observed." It seemed to me that the concept of her attending therapy was simply unfathomable.
But, okay. She went to my class. I can't imagine the poor girl's report. "Okay, so I met this grad student, and she showed me a therapy room, and then we went to Starbucks and she bought a lot of caffeine, and we went to her class, and a bunch of other grad students did a performance. And then after that the class talked about how it's okay to be disabled."
I think I utterly terrified her. She asked me about what a "typical day" is like for me, and her eyes continued to widen as I described therapy, supervision, practicum, classes, teaching, dissertation proposal, and trying to have a life. The poor girl HADN'T HEARD of grad sc hool. When she started to add up the number of years between high school and a Ph.D., she almost freaked.
I tried to be reassuring, I really did. I said: "Well...you just take it one thing at a time. And it's not too bad." But I said this with huge circles under my eyes and a venti cappucino in hand.
Well...at least she'll know?
But, okay. She went to my class. I can't imagine the poor girl's report. "Okay, so I met this grad student, and she showed me a therapy room, and then we went to Starbucks and she bought a lot of caffeine, and we went to her class, and a bunch of other grad students did a performance. And then after that the class talked about how it's okay to be disabled."
I think I utterly terrified her. She asked me about what a "typical day" is like for me, and her eyes continued to widen as I described therapy, supervision, practicum, classes, teaching, dissertation proposal, and trying to have a life. The poor girl HADN'T HEARD of grad sc hool. When she started to add up the number of years between high school and a Ph.D., she almost freaked.
I tried to be reassuring, I really did. I said: "Well...you just take it one thing at a time. And it's not too bad." But I said this with huge circles under my eyes and a venti cappucino in hand.
Well...at least she'll know?
posted by Wild West Intern @ 8:18 AM
2 Comments:
At 17/11/06 10:51,
Anonymous said…
Hahaha, wow -- that poor girl... but I'm sure she will be fine. She will end up in college no matter what, and then she will learn about grad school and what it means to be a professor or a therapist or a Dr. of anything.. and if she still really wants it, she will slowly come to accept that 5+ years of stress and exhausion are what she must endure.
If anyone had told me in high school that I would still be in school until I was roughly 28 years old, I would have laughed -- but after four years of college, when you start weighing grad school against the cold, cruel, corporate world, it starts to seem like a viable option.
At 20/11/06 16:11,
Wild West Intern said…
Yeah...plus, if she really wants to be a therapist, the years of school are worth it.
Yeah. It's weird. Even though most of my colleagues are in their 30's, it still seems like we're just too damn young to finish school!
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