"...and all this science, I don't understand. It's just my job five days a week..."
-Elton John
I really do love psychology, but sometimes I feel very disconnected from the world of academia. I want to understand people and to know how to help people, but some days it feels like the stuff I spend my time doing has very little to do with any of that. Sometimes grad school feels like some sort of silly obstacle course, and instead of teaching us what we need to know, it tests us to see how badly we want to know, then releases us out into the world with a degree that qualifies us to figure it out on our own.
I was thinking the other day about my first day at Pathways, when I didn't even realize what I had been hired to do. I was passively observing a group therapy session, and Vicki, my boss, abruptly asked me to take the uncooperative kid next to me into the other room for an individual session. I was shocked and terrified, and I felt like I was mostly making stuff up as I went along. It turned out to be one of my best sessions, actually, but the whole time, I just kept thinking about how unqualified I was to do what I was doing. And yet... after a year (almost) of grad school, I can't think of anything that I know now that would've made me any more prepared or less freaked out about that situation. That's not to say I haven't learned anything; I've learned some research things and some theories and such, but hardly anything that really translates into how to be a therapist.
Maybe next year.