Time2Track Blog
Real-Life Resources for Students & Early Career Professionals
The Simple Way to Beat Procrastination in Grad School
In order to excel in graduate school, you may have to start developing certain habits and practices. Some of these include dedication, sacrifice, anxiety, and for many, a dash of perfectionism.
Perfectionism, however, can be both a blessing and a curse.
On the one hand, perfectionism allows you to push yourself farther than perhaps you thought you could go and to produce work that is of a higher caliber.
Unfortunately, perfectionism can also lead you down a dark road. As we all know, nothing is ever perfect, and if you expect your work to be, you will always find it lacking. For many people, this creates a self-destructive cycle of feeling like the work is never going to be good enough.
As a result, people experience anxiety from those worries, and then avoidance to help cope with the feelings of anxiety. This is procrastination.
Political Therapy: When Your Client Talks Politics
Can’t you just feel the tension of this year’s political climate?
Look at you, reading a blog post about politics on a psychology website.
And who can blame you? Only about 24 million people may have tuned in to the live presidential debate between Clinton and Trump [1], but everyone is talking about it. With the presidential election coming up, you can bet your clipboard that your clients are going to bring this into session.
Most clinicians can agree that political conversations have little place in the therapy room. Angsting about presidential prospects and governmental goings-on appears to have limited healing power for our clients. Regardless, our clients continue to ask us where we stand on gun control, whether we are pro-life or pro-choice, and for whom we plan to vote.
So, what do we do when our clients want to talk politics?
The Pros and Cons of Working at a Community Mental Health Center
Psychologists, psychotherapists, social workers, and other mental health professionals have the professional flexibility and freedom to work in a number of diverse settings.
Everything ranging from inpatient and outpatient hospitals, Veteran Affairs medical centers, college counseling centers, private practices, and community health centers, among many others.
It is often said that working at a community mental health center (CMHC) can be one of the most difficult and challenging sites for mental health work, and yet it can also be one of the most rewarding experiences.
How to Survive as a Parent in Grad School
Regardless of whether graduate school or children became part of your life first, the task of managing them all will reflect upon both how you experienced and successfully completed your program as well as how your children and family experienced it with you.
While you have already thought about your future and the future of your family by committing to completing graduate school while raising children, it is always the right time to be mindful and be connected with the “here and now” – or at least on the immediate task at hand: writing a paper, completing the semester, etc.
The experience of being on task, managing family, and successfully completing the program can be better achieved by following five basic principles…
Yes, You Can Overcome Grad School Burnout – Here’s How
Previously in this series, we introduced burnout and outlined symptoms of burnout to look out for.
In this article, we will discuss strategies that can help you prevent and treat burnout, so that you can continue to excel in your graduate program and future career as a behavioral health professional (or if you found this article and you’re not in the behavioral health field, these burnout tips can help you regardless of your field).
Oftentimes there are environmental factors (e.g., too few resources, too many responsibilities, too little time) that contribute to the experience of burnout; however, these factors are often outside of our control. Fortunately, there are things you can be doing to cope with environmental stressors and manage your response to frustrations.
Ideally, these strategies should be implemented early on to prevent burnout from occurring. However, even if symptoms of burnout have already reared their ugly head, these strategies can help break the cycle of behavior and thinking patterns that can produce and perpetuate the symptoms of burnout.
Patient Suicide: Reflections on a Shattered Illusion
As a psychologist, a profession that brings both routine and unpredictability, I try to hold onto – and maybe even control – what I can.
For me, that means starting each day with my cup of coffee (which I often leave on the Keurig until reminded by someone that I made it) and looking at my schedule to plan for my next few days.
There is comfort in the routine and also excitement in the possibilities of the unknown. Together, this dialectic keeps me passionate for what I do with my patients in consultation, therapy, and assessment.
And yet, one possibility, a mostly unspoken fear during my education and at training sites, was the chance that I would lose a patient to suicide.
Throughout my many practica and on internship, I completed numerous risk assessments and hospitalized patients voluntarily and, in a few cases, involuntarily. The focus of those interventions was the preservation of safety and the illusion that I would be able to keep each of those individuals alive.
Your Blueprint for Winning at Psychology Grad School
Graduate training programs in psychology prepare students for successful careers in academia, research and clinical practice; however, not all training programs offer the type of non-academic professional development support that can help students stand out and excel in their training and future careers.
After all, each student has their own personal strengths, and who wouldn’t want to highlight those strengths?
As a graduate student or early career psychologist, one may never think of how to professionally advance outside of successfully completing program requirements, getting the right placement/job, and obtaining a license. The six areas of non-academic tips for success offered below make up a model of related factors that can lead to success in these processes and build professional relationships along the way.
Making the Best of Unplanned Client Termination
Client termination, whether it is planned or unplanned, is difficult.
It can lead the clinician to having a multitude of emotions. After all, it is the ending of a relationship, which can be a challenging thing for any of us to go through.
To make it harder, most individuals are not taught appropriate techniques to end a relationship. How many of us plan on how we are going to conclude a relationship? We are social beings at heart and are not often focused on planning for the conclusion of a connection nor are we trained in healthy ways to process the ending of a relationship.
Despite these challenges, it is important for clinicians to always be focused on the possibility of termination in order to gain comfort and understanding of how it impacts both the client and clinician.
How do you Find a “Super” Clinical Supervisor?
“What type of supervision will I receive at this training site?”
How many times have you asked this question during your interviews for practicum, pre-doctoral internship, or post-doctoral training sites? I recall my own apprehension about my clinical supervisors over the last few years.
I had the opportunity to experience wonderful clinical supervisors who provided excellent supervision. I attribute my professional and personal development as a clinical psychologist to the clinical supervisors I worked with during my graduate school training.
Having a Chronic Illness During Grad School & Internship
My story begins at the tender age of 23, when I was looking forward to starting graduate school and raising my son, who was one year old at the time.
That day in August 2007 still remains very vivid in my mind, as I recall sitting at my desk at work, enjoying what felt like one of the best days thus far.
Then I received a phone call that changed my life forever, and I heard the following: “Shenae, I don’t know how to tell you this, but we received your test results and they appear to look just like your mother’s, which means you, too, have lupus.”
FROM OUR PARTNERS
