Our Favorite Sessions

Into the session she came with the idea for her topic but she also told me that she was a little bit hesitant about the topic and about, like, fleshing out her ideas and organizing her thoughts. So I started off the session as usual with understanding the assignment guidelines. And then I guess, in order to kind of navigate her hesitancies, I just started asking her a lot of questions about why is this topic personally important to you, what's your experience with it, like, what research have you done on it and why do you think it's relevant. And I think as she started to speak more about it, I could see her passion come out, and by the end of the session, like, we were really able to flesh out an entire outline for her letter. And she told me that she felt like just being able to come in and have a conversation made her realize that a lot of the questions that she had the answers were already in her own mind or starting to be in her own mind but it was just nice to have a conversation.

She really wanted to go, and it was like a short 500 page essay. She came in with absolutely nothing. She just was like ‚I don’t know what to write, and she was super intimidated by it. And I just asked her, well, what are your experiences with this place? Like why do you want to go?‚ And I just kept asking her questions about why she’s interested in the program. And at first she felt like she was hitting a wall but then she told me that she had gone to this place before, and um she went a couple times with family, she learned the language on her own. So after a couple sessions she came back. We just spent the first session just outlining, and I just wrote down whatever she was saying. The main thing was really just about validating her thoughts and just, you know, getting her to think about the right things. But it takes some time. So then she came back with a more updated draft of it, and she just kept working on it, and by the end she just felt really confident with what she had.