Ashley Barton

Agency: Divorce Recovery (Our Family Services)

Term: Fall - 2001

The Family Counseling Agency provides many services to children and adults who need help dealing with a number of family issues and crises. Counseling, divorce recovery, domestic violence services, education for life classes, senior programs, judicial supervision programs, and programs to help get teens off the streets are all offered through the agency. The agency serves the citizens of the community by offering most of the services for free or for very little money. Everyone from kindergarteners to senior citizens is served through this agency.

I decided to do an internship my senior year for a few reasons. One reason is that I know that I want to help families and children in some way when I get older, but I did not know exactly how. There is counseling or psychology, and then there are children, marriages, seniors, homeless, and many more sectors of the population who are in need of help, and I did not know which I wanted to be my main focus. I felt that by working with kids I would know better if that is what I wanted to pursue in the future. I also wanted to find out if I was interested in working in an agency or in private practice. Another reason I wanted to do an internship was because I am applying to graduate school for the fall of 2002, and graduate applications ask you to write about things you have done outside of academics in the area in which you are applying. Graduate schools really stress extracurricular activities, so that they know you are serious and really interested in this field. One other reason I wanted to do an internship is I knew that I would probably learn more at a hands-on internship site than I ever would in any classroom. There is no class offered that could teach me the things I have learned working with the kids and the parents each week.

After graduation I plan to attend graduate school. I have applied to the counseling program at Arizona State University. It is a two-year program and prepares you to either enter a doctoral program or start counseling. My goal is to have a private practice and counsel children about divorce or death in the family, and I would like to have a marriage counseling practice.

Since starting the internship I have learned that I love working with kids, and I have also learned how emotionally attached you can get to your clients and their issues. I have learned that I love helping people and working through their problems. I have also gained a lot of knowledge about how a counseling agency is run, what work goes into it, where money comes from, and what kinds of programs are out there.

The advice I would give to a student thinking about an internship is that it may seem like more work than a 3 unit class on campus, but I know that you will regret it if you do not get hands-on experience in a field you love to work in. I would tell you that you should definitely do it, and you will learn more at the internship than you did in all of your other classes in your entire college career. You will love meeting the people you are going to help, and you will get tremendous satisfaction knowing that you are helping so many people in so many ways. In my opinion, an internship should be a mandatory graduation requirement for any undergraduate degree. Right now it isn't, but wouldn't you rather be doing something than sitting in a classroom taking notes on a lecture?

Since this is real life experience, some very real and emotional things come up in the support group that I help lead. One day we were leading our group and we told the kids to write down some feelings on a card, and then we were going to put them all in a box and bury it. All of the children were writing down how the divorce made them feel, and the leaders were walking around and looking. I walked by one little boy and saw that he had written, "I want to leave this world" on his card. We felt that this was an extreme feeling to be having, so we spoke with our mentor and found a few different ways to deal with the situation. Even though I am a senior in college, I am working in a place that lets me deal with these very serious situations first hand and gain some very valuable knowledge and experience.

University of Arizona | College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
School of Family and Consumer Sciences | Family Studies and Human Development

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