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| Icyf < Service_learning < Students < Internship < Meet_the_interns < Intern_stories < | |||||||
Intern Stories
Kim KaspariAgency: Our Family ServicesTerm: Fall - 2001
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| I am currently conducting my internship at Our Town Family Center. Our Town is a non-profit organization designed to help utilize the strengths of our community to provide the children, youth, and families opportunities for success. As an intern, I work in the Crisis Department as a volunteer crisis counselor. A couple of my main responsibilities are answering the crisis line and providing assistance during counseling sessions. While working with the crisis line, I am to do over the phone counseling, crisis stabilization, and complete the necessary paper work. The counseling services that Our Town offers include individual, family, and/or group in-home or in-office counseling sessions. For each session, a certified staff member and I go out as a team and help clients develop a treatment plan based on their needs. I am going to be graduating this December, and a little while back I was starting to get nervous about what I was going to do with myself after I finished school. So when I heard about this internship I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to put some direction into my upcoming plans. Although I am still unsure about my plans, I feel that this internship has given me some great experience. Since I began my internship back in August, I have learned a lot. One thing I have discovered is that while working with families and other members of the community, you really learn a lot about yourself. An extremely important policy at Our Town is that staff and volunteers are to provide clients with a non-judgmental environment. In order to do this you really must do some self-exploration and find the deeply engraved biases that you hold and may not even be aware of. I feel this has not only given me insight about myself, but it has also helped me become a more efficient and effective listener. For anyone who is questioning whether he or she should do this internship my advice would be to go for it. Despite what you are learning about right now, real world experience teaches you more than any lecture could. You get to work with a variety of people, and not only do you learn new skills but you get to apply them to all kinds of situations. Everyday is more interesting than the last. |
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