Week 10

Just about every time I am at my internship, I am a shadow for my mentor. Everyday I get to work about an hour after my mentor does. I know that before I get there, she is preparing her lessons and activities for each client. When I get there, she usually tells me what she plans on doing for the day and for each client begin to set them up. If there is a break before the next client, we will wait to set up the activity. I have found that if I try to set up the activities for the day, it can become a bit clustered and I get confused. So if I put aside a few minutes and just become organized in my own mind I don't get overwhelmed. My mentor has an organizer so she writes everything down that we will be doing for the day. Now that I have been at my internship for a while, my mentor trusts me to understand what each activity is.
So after deciding on activities for the day, the rest of the work day goes pretty smooth. We have clients just about each hour and perform the activities that we've planned for the day. Once the client's have all gone and appointments are done for the day, we take a minute to organize our thoughts and I help my mentor clean up and organize all the activities that we performed that day.

Week 8

You can view my e-resume at
http://cacollamer.angelfire.com/christieco/resume.htm

Week 7

Although I enjoy working with my mentor at the speech pathology center, I do not think this is what I wish to pursue as a career. I see that my mentor really likes what she does and is enthusiastic about it every single day, even after 30+ years, but after almost two months, I'm getting a bit burnt out. It is exciting because your activities can change every day and with each client's needs, but nonetheless, it does become hard to continue on from week to week. I feel like there is a lot of pressure not necessarily on me, but on my mentor for each client because she is getting paid so that these children improve their quality of speech. I wonder if there is ever a time that she feels she is failing to improve with any child. The pressure to have a child increase their skills from week to week would probably be too much for me. There is nothing that I really dislike about my internship site, but it is definitely nothing I want to do in the future. I don't believe I will pursue a career in education, but you never know, because I may not have many other options. Because I have a good amount of experience in education, I think I could have a good career and make a decent contribution to education, but I think there are better, more patient people out there to take care of this. I think my internship site does teach me to be more patient with people in general and this will help me in my future. I intend on having children of my own in the distant future and I think my internship has and will be a great base of children's education. I have many aspirations for my life after college and I change my mind just about every day, but since one of my concentrations is psychology, I think that is a great base for any career. I intend on being in a job where I work closely with other people, so educating someone on a particular product and knowing how to make the product more appealing from a psychological stand point will increase my productivity.