Who, who are you?

Take one extended family, add a birthday surprise party for parents, throw in a healthy serving of interviews, and move repeatedly from one home to the other. While waiting to learn where you will spend the next year of your life, gently fold in time with the inlaws, multiple hour drives, and be away from home for two weeks. Let sit, and you get pure exhaustion.

It has been wonderful to be back in the area I consider “home.” Hubs and I were able to go to the church plant that we hope to one-day call a church home. I spent lazy moments with my brother and his wife, enjoyed early morning views of the mountains, and saw all my grandparents. I also had some great dinners with a good friend. I wish I could move all of the people I love into the same geographical place. But then again, that might undo some of the reasons I find them all so charming, enjoyable, and life giving.

So far, I’ve had two interviews. One was in a southern state in a rural town, a consortium of a residential children’s home, a state hospital, and a community mental health site. The facility was drab, and the people were kind. However, I found the professionalism of the candidates and the site staff to be lacking. I am all for warm, but I found them overly casual. I left the interview wondering if I had misjudged what I could expect from an internship site. I learned more from what questions they did not ask rather than from the questions that they did. The thought of training at that site, living in that town, and working with those people, well it was merely tolerable or doable. To be frank, I was feeling disappointed with the quality of the other applicants. Two of the five were from a distributed learning school.

Distributed learning? While these applicants are likely intelligent and capable, I do not feel comfortable with APA’s recent accreditation of correspondence programs. I just do not see how the 3 to 5 years I spent with mentors, living and being with people who I both loved and didn’t love so much, and having a faculty of one mind evaluate my growth as a clinical professional could be paralleled by submitting my papers online and engaging in online discussion and critique. One applicant even said, “Well, the bad part is that other people can see your work and critique it, because we submit all of our assignments to the entire group.” To me, the ability to give and receive feedback is instrumental to being an empathic and effective person AND professional.

The second site is a community mental health site that does traditional therapy, primary care consulting (a new skill area for me), and some day treatment for the persistently and severely mentally ill. I really liked this site. First, the level of professionalism was evident, yet the people were warm. So often, professionals who work long term in such agencies or settings are unhappy, burnt out, cynical and jaded. But these were fresh faced people who genuinely enjoyed their work, who wanted to know me. They knew my application, remembering where I had worked, with whom I had worked, and where I was from. The other site’s professionals were glancing through it as I walked into the interview and knew very little about me.

It was so refreshing to hear from a site that turns no one away due to lack of payment, whose eyes shine bright at discussing their desire for all employees to have a calling beyond the agency where they work, and for high quality training as a way of giving back to the profession. This site will be high on my list. The other applicants were appropriately professional, and you could tell that this group of individuals were well informed about how to be genuine but respectful of the professional setting.

So, I’m tired, but I keep on trucking. I leave tomorrow evening for another interview in a rural area Monday morning, and yet another on Tuesday morning near Nashville. Then I get to fly back home for one day of rest. I can’t wait to see my husband, sleep in my own bed, and kiss my kitties.