What Comes Next?

One of the main purposes of being employed as an intern at a chosen internship site is to gain insight and experience in a specific field of interest and decide if you like your role or not quite. As someone who has not had much prior experience in psychology prior to my role as an intern, I found it difficult to decide what I wanted to do. I had to choose which population I wanted to serve, what services I wanted to provide, and what kind of job I wanted to perform for the entire school year. I have always had a natural approach when working with kids, and I was eager to find an internship that would allow me to work with children of all ages. The internship I found works mostly with young children with developmental disabilities. Upon spending the last couple of months as a behavioral technician intern, I have gained insight on how a career working with children full-time would really be like. I now understand which aspects of the job I favor and which ones I do not enjoy. It is important for us to understand that choosing a long-term career must be something that we genuinely enjoy doing. I have grown to understand that performance within a given job is heavily influenced by the environment and the relationships within the workplace. Within these last couple of months as an intern, I have been able to set long-term goals for my future, in both my career and personal life, that I strive to accomplish and that I envision for myself.  

A career in this specific field of psychology that I am pursuing at my internship site can easily be overwhelming and tiring. As I have learned, working with children takes a lot of effort and energy. I often find myself uneager and unexcited to go into my job which started to really bother me since I thought that I wanted to work with young kids. However, I realized that the problem is not necessarily the children but the environment and setting of the job that I perform. Since I work almost always in the client's home, I began to notice that I tend to get very overwhelmed with constantly making sure that I am performing perfectly and accurately with the client since there are constantly eyes on me, making sure I am respecting the boundaries within a family’s household setting, and always acting professional even when I am surrounded by the entire family even when I must listen to conversations between family members that are often informal. In terms of my long-term goals, I aspire to work in a much different setting. I see myself working in a facility, more specifically in a school setting where I feel comfortable in my own office or classroom. One of my goals is to have control over my own work environment to an extent which I feel like I do not have within this internship and which I can obtain when working in a school through having my own classroom or office. In an article published by the Stress and Health: Journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress, Vischer argues that having comfort within the physical work environment, which includes having control over the likes and dislikes of the workplace, can lead to improvement of task performance and productivity (Vischer, 2007). Another long-term goal that I have for my future is that I do want to serve the younger population. Through this job, I have gained even more experience with children, and I have made so many positive memories. I am positive that there is no other group that I would like to serve more than young children, which has become one of my long-term goals that I truly aspire to accomplish. I desire to work as a school psychologist or school counselor because I will be able to form connections and provide services for my preferred population. Another long-term goal that I have been able to set thanks to this internship experience is to find a job that not only rewards the population but also rewards your back. At my internship, I provide Applied Behavioral Analysis therapy which can be extremely rewarding when you master a target that you have been working on for months with a client. The feeling of knowing you made a significant difference in someone’s life is one of the greatest things to experience and it truly motivates me to keep working hard. This is a long-term goal that I strive to accomplish in my future career which is to always feel like your role is making a difference in someone’s life so that you always get to experience those rewarding moments in life.  

Reference Page

Vischer, J. C. (2007). The effects of the physical environment on job performance: Towards a

theoretical model of workspace stress. Stress and Health: Journal of the International

Society for the Investigation of Stress, 23(3), 175–184. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.1134