Michelle is in her fifth year of doctoral studies at Vanderbilt University. She will soon be a licensed Clinical Psychologist, specializing in children and family therapy. Whether researching or in-session at the clinic, Michelle is passionate about helping others and urges those who are interested in her career to be as well!
Transcript
>> So I am in my 5th year of grad school. And sort of preparing for a career in clinical psychology. But the nice thing about graduate school is that it's not just classes. It's also seeing clients and doing research. So you're actually getting the real experiences of the career. So every year at graduate school, you do what's called a practicum and I just did outpatient therapy with lots of different clients. I am especially interested in kids who have trauma histories. So I saw a lot of kids who had been abused or neglected and luckily most of them were in like new homes and really good healthy fosters families. And just kind of helping them, sort of transition. Also saw kids who had issues like depression or ADHD, kind of a really wide variety. Which was a really good training experience. Typically a session is about 50 minutes. Some families, I kind of go over if I was going to spend some time with the child individually and then also see the family as a unit. In clinical psychology graduate program, you learn a lot of very structured sort of approaches to therapy. And so [inaudible] trauma focus cognitive behavioral therapy. And it starts by providing the kids with some coping skills. And then also sort of helping them to address their, what the appearance was for them sort of head on and kind of deal with it in a healthy way and understand it. It wasn't their fault. You know, and kind of deal with any sort of issues they're having related to that. So it's about a third for each. So a third of your time is spent doing research. A third of your time is spent doing clinical work. And a third of it is in classes. So the thing I really like about the program is that it is so varied in what you do day to day. See some days I can come in and, you know, sweat pants, and I'm just working, you know going to class and working on research stuff at my desk. Other days, I'm seeing clients and that's really interesting. And some days, you have kind of a little bit of both. It's really nice because if you get sick of one thing, you have something else to look forward to.
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