Natalie Shue

Agency: Divorce Recovery (Our Family Services)

Term: Spring - 2002

My internship is at the Family Counseling Agency, in the Divorce Recovery Program. At the office, I assist with answering phones and with other office responsibilities. I have also attended a six-week training session to become a group leader for a divorce support group for children. I am starting that in a couple weeks.

The Family Counseling Agency serves a vast part of the Tucson community, offering an array of services. The department I work for offers classes and support groups for parents and families going through divorce. They offer the mandatory parenting class for all parents getting a divorce with minor children. This is a four-hour class that explains to parents the difficulties that their children will be going through. In addition, they offer ten-week divorce support groups for adults called Divorce Recovery and an eight-week group for children. Anyone in the community can participate in these groups.

I decided to do this internship because I was really interested in relationship and family dynamics. I recently decided that this was the area I wanted to pursue in my graduate studies, Marriage and Family Therapy. Participating in this internship has really given me the opportunity to learn things that I wouldn't necessarily learn in a classroom. My mentor, Dr. Frank Williams, has really taught me a lot about the relationship process and how people cope with it. I have also been fortunate enough to learn how a non-profit organization operates.

The advice I would give to anyone looking for an internship would be to find one that really suits your interests and your educational needs. I really feel that working at the Family Counseling Agency has given me a lot of knowledge, and so far and it's only mid-semester! I also know that at this agency I have a lot more to learn, especially since there are several other departments that I can learn from as well.

The first thing I did once I started in the Divorce Recovery program was to go through training with about thirty other people from the Tucson community. This was an eight-week training program where we learned about the divorce recovery process and how to be an effective group leader. This has been a really wonderful experience because I have met extraordinary people in the process that I wouldn't have met otherwise. Some of these people I probably won't work with in the future since I will be participating in children's groups, but I have learned a great deal from each of them and their own personal experiences. Even though I have been doing this internship for a couple months now, I haven't even begun all the exciting things my mentor has planned for me and I can't wait.

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School of Family and Consumer Sciences | Family Studies and Human Development

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