Monday Morning Nerves - New Series - Being Internship Supervisor

It is time to go back to work after a week off for Spring Break. I am nervous about going back - I always am when I have a new intern starting. I have been up since a little before 3am, and I am starting to feel the "get there early" twinges of anxiety starting to rear their ugly heads. It is WAY too early for that, but I still am feeling those twinges.

It has been a long time since I have had two interns at the same time - about a year now. I do this every so often when I need to take a break from being supervisor and to simply be therapist. I had offered a position to someone last year who would have filled up my time, but that person declined the offer, so I left it open. The second time frame where I could have had an intern was a time that I really needed to be therapist again, so I did not fill up the available spot. This is one of the tricks that I have to keep myself from burning out - taking time away from supervision in order to be therapist again.

I have lots of internship supervisor things to do today - send out an offer letter and start up a new intern's orientation process. Intern #34 will be in training most of the rest of this week, so today is the first opportunity to observe music therapy before four days of training. Meanwhile, Intern #33 is moving to full leadership with me leaving the area as much as possible to promote independence and authority in the session. I have to set up the shared drive for #34 and review all of the stuff in #33's drive. This is the type of thing that I often neglect, so it is time to get caught up.

First though, I have to get to work and put things away. My office, as it usually is, is a mess of things that I am in the middle of organizing. I would like to make some progress on things today so that it looks somewhat coordinated. Once I get my space a bit more organized, I will be able to make my to-do list and start to finish things.

I decided, late last night, right before I fell asleep, that I am going to start a new series of posts all concerned about being an internship supervisor/director/mentor. I will refer to interns by number rather than by name or pronouns. I will write from my own experiences and will talk about the things that happen in my program. This will not be "the" experience of being an internship supervising music therapist, but it will be "my" experience. These will be my Monday posts.

So, here is a bit of background about me and my internship program. I applied to be an internship director right before NAMT and AAMT merged back in the late 1990's. I was accepted as a National Roster Internship program under the NAMT parameters, but I embraced the competency-based nature of the new AMTA wholeheartedly. For me, competency-based training makes sense, and the Professional Competencies are the foundation of all of my program elements. I will explain more about that in the next couple of weeks. I accepted my first intern much faster than I felt comfortable with after being approved as a program, but that intern was a wonderful first intern and helped me figure out what was important for me as a supervisor.

My program went inactive for a while due to facility changes and a major injury that I sustained at work. I was not able to juggle surgery, physical therapy, light duty, and interns, so I took some time away from being an internship director. That ended up being about two years away. I am now back into my routine as internship director/supervising music therapist with occasional breaks to get back into the role of music therapist.

There are times when I do not enjoy being supervisor. There are times when I love being supervisor. There are times when I miss being therapist in every bone of my body! There are times when I feel like I need to escape and be on my own.

This is the first time that I will have two interns in the office space that I have right now. We will see how that works. I need space, and it has been an adjustment to share office space. In 2017, I moved to a room where I had two storage rooms. I used them as my office and an office space for interns. At the beginning of 2021, I got another room for storage - for four months when I had to give up my two storage rooms and move entirely into the other storage room as my office. After having four years of separate offices, the adjustment of sharing my work space was difficult. It will be interesting to see how I feel about having two humans in my space again. It has been a long time - about eight years - since I shared office space with two interns.

It is now 5:10am. I am almost ready to get started on my journey to work and to clean my office space enough to fit in another person. I put the things that I want to take with me by my purse and backpack last evening, so all I have to do is collect all the stuff and get it into the car. I have one group to lead, one individual session, and two groups to supervise today. It is an easy therapy day, so it is perfect to welcome an intern. Intern #34 will have supervision/consultation sessions on Monday afternoons, so orientation will fit in with the new schedule very well. I am hoping to get some quiet time in my office before my current intern arrives so I can get my organizing done and get my session strategies figured out before I have to talk to someone else. We will see what happens.

Thanks for reading. If you are an internship supervising music therapist, please comment. I would love to know what types of topics you would like to know about my internship program...