Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Job Applications and the First Day of my Internship

Well, I forgot to write last night. Not only does this mean that I officially suck, it also means I have two days worth of life to write about. Hopefully this post won't get too long. We'll see.

Well, yesterday I went for a walk. Yes, it was a gloriously wet day and I went for a walk to the shopping plaza by my house. Not only was the sock soaking weather just fun to walk through--I was on a mission! I had a mission to collect as many job applications as I could, and trust me, I could collect a lot.

I am applying at:
iParty
Big Lots
Famous Footwear
GameStop
A. C. Moore
Old Navy
Kohl’s
L. L. Bean
Papa John’s
Verizon Wireless Zone
Subway
Pepino’s Mexican Restaurant
Harley-Davidson
Dollar Tree
Home Depot
Chili’s
and Borders

My dream jobs from this list would probably be Borders and Gamestop. We'll see though. I've finished online applications for Borders, Home Depot, L.L. Bean, and A.C. Moore so maybe I'll start hearing from people soon. Maybe. Maybe I'm just a little cocky in thinking that I am desirable to employers.

Next, jump forward 24 hours to...today! Today was the first official day of my internship and I have decided, after taking notes right after leaving, that I would describe the whole thing in detail here.

1:50 p.m. Slip shoes on. Speed walk out the door. I thought my house was a 10 minute walk from The Acadia Hospital. It turns out that it's actually about 15. After walking through some freshly cut grass, of course getting some to cling to my shoes on the way, I pulled out my phone while under the highway overpass. 1:57. Dang it, I realized I was going to be late. I went as fast as I could without being reckless and managed to get in to the lobby at 2:05.

Acadia is a huge, wood paneled building that was built onto an old homeopathic hospital. The homeopathic hospital is now the outpatient portion of Acadia and sticks out of the main building like an oddly shaped tree limb, branches shooting off in all different directions to create a maze of long hallways.

After notifying the front desk of where I was going I walked out of the main building and into one of the tunnel-like halls of the outpatient building. One of the hallways is all glass on each wall. Every time I have walked through that hallway I wish I could just stop and look out those windows. Shortly after I arrive at the office of my supervisor, Dr. Ward.

As I sat down in my chair, dropping my backpack next to my chair, I turned to face the the clinical psychologist I will be spending the summer working with. This taut-faced, no-nonsense woman sits with her streamlined white hair tightly pulled back. As we began talking I realized that I am ridiculously intimidated just by the sheer amount of knowledge Dr. Ward has in her head.

We were meeting this time for a didactic session as I have not yet had my official orientation at the hospital yet. Dr. Ward talked about a lot of things that I wish I knew a lot more about. I hope I can manage to keep up this summer. To be honest I am feeling somewhat nervous. Not only do I feel that I sounded like a bumbling idiot today, I also am not sure that I am quite as fascinated by psychology as I thought I was. Reading Irvin Yalom's Love's Executioner makes psychotherapy seem so exciting and fun and, I can't think of a good word here, maybe easy. But what I am seeing in my internship is intake and assessment and that stuff is a lot of paperwork. Maybe I'm not quite as cut out for this work as I thought I was. We'll see. It's odd when I can say "Well, at least I have writing to fall back on."

Anyway, that's been my last two days. Now I am quite exhausted and will hopefully be going to bed soon. I hope you enjoyed reading!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Chris - As this is a public space, and your state is very small (people-wise), I strongly suggest you begin to think about if/how you will create anonymity for the people you will be working with and writing about. Health care bloggers all wrestle with this, but it's critical. Some have lost their jobs over it. Patients obviously have to be anonymous, but your co-workers might also be miffed if you write about them. Your employer most likely has a blogging policy for its employees; if not, might want to Google for a typical one or a discussion thereof. In general, you should not use the real names of your co-workers in your blog. (Not sure if you did this or not, just wanted to give you the heads up that this could become an issue.)
:-) --Pauline