Orientation and quite possibly my last first day of school

It's official...tomorrow, my new university owns my life. Sort of. I will be there every fall, spring, and summer until August 2012 (or some time around there) when I will graduate with my master's degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. I thought at this point I would feel a strong sense of dread. Not the sort of dread one feels on the way to the guillotine. Nothing horrible. I expected the sense of dread one feels when she realizes that in exchange for her shiny new iPhone, she must sign on for another two years with AT&T. It's that feeling of obtaining something truly great and realizing that there is a price attached. But I don't feel that any more. I realize that I'm locked in to a serious commitment for over 2 years, and that it's going to be a lot of hard work with some trade-offs (one being that for the last 8 months or so of my program, I can't work because I have to work full time, forty hours a week, at an internship. Broke never looked so scary). On the positive side, this is what I've always wanted to do. A friend of mine recently told me she couldn't see me doing anything else. Neither can I.

I went to orientation on Thursday night. In my nervousness, I walked out of it at one point believing I was in the wrong room. Then I sat at a table that was mostly faculty, and when I realized everyone looked older and more sure of themselves, I opted for a table at the front. Unlike the other tables around me, my table wasn't chatty. One girl was in the middle of Breaking Dawn, someone else was texting. A few stared blankly into space, and I exchanged occasional awkward smiles and "What are we supposed to do now?" glances with the girl across from me.

There was an extremely long powerpoint presentation covering the basics for all three Counselor Education programs. There's school counseling, marriage and family therapy (MFT), and mental health counseling (MHS). They introduced us to all the important faculty and shared their research interests, discussed how good our program is and why what we're doing is different from psychology (if you don't know, why are you in this program?).

[We will now take a brief intermission to explain what the difference is between what I am studying and what other people who want to become psychologists are studying...Please note that while I do have my Bachelor of Science in Family and Child Sciences, I am only just starting my graduate program and what I am saying may not be 100% accurate or complete. But I'm at least 90%, I think.]

Some people may think (unfortunately) that MFTs are not as equipped as psychologists or that getting your license in MFT rather than psychology is an easier way to go. Total B.S. The reason I decided to become an MFT was not because it was easier or less work (because, hello, how many years am I spending in grad school? Plus, that's not even counting my doctorate which I plan on obtaining at a later date). What I love about MFT is that it takes into account more than a person's diagnosis. I am there to figure out how I can help change the way this person lives in order to make all aspects of their life more affective. After all, when you think about it, when a person is having a difficult time it affects more than just their overall mood. It affects performance in their career or schoolwork, relationships with others, social interactions, involvement in the community, etc. The whole system in which they live isn't working and they need a new system. I help them make that possible in addition to dealing with whatever diagnosis (if there is one) that I've found to be accurate for that client. MFT takes relationships between the client and other areas of life into account. AND we are trained to deal with whole families. How many entire families do you know that see a psychologist together?

Didn't think so. *Climbs off soapbox*

Back to orientation. They discussed classes (I guess some of the classes are required for all 3 programs, so we'll be mingling), and how after one C you're basically screwed. I'm not worried. Unless we're talking about math, the C's I've earned in my lifetime were because I wasn't getting the help I needed and applying myself. I want to be in grad school, so C's aren't an issue. That didn't stop one girl from asking about ten million questions about how if she thinks she's going to get a C, can she drop the class or get an incomplete. Why the hell would you anticipate failure? *shakes head* Anyway, it went on like that until the whole thing ended with a few friendly psychological tests. You read that right. Apparently this is part of an evaluation that we have to fill out several times during our program. My personal favorite was the sentence completion section. I would love to know when it was created and by whom, since I found some of the sentences to be a little, shall we say, archaic. For example:

A man's job ___________________.

A man feels good when ______________.

A wife ____________________.


Who wrote this shit? June Cleaver? At this point I was late for a date with my boyfriend and the orientation had run over the allotted time by about half an hour. I was hungry and tired and wasn't in the mood to think of truly appropriate answers and besides, shouldn't these people get the real me? So I wrote a few things like:

A "man's job" is a social construct. Yay feminism! :)
A man feels good when...I really wouldn't know. I think you should ask a man.
A wife should be equal to her husband.


And I'll keep on filling it out like that until they update it. Let's get the 2009 version in there.