Being An Internship Supervisor: Finding My Own Way

I started my internship in 1998 and was approved before the National Association for Music Therapy merged into the American Music Therapy Association with the American Association for Music Therapy. My first intern started WAY earlier than I thought I was ready to go. She arrived, full of enthusiasm and three months earlier than I was planning, and off I went into a world of learning how to be a supervisor with an intern learning how to be an intern. 

I am now looking at my 35th intern - we are in the downhill slide with #35 - and I feel like I have a handle on some of the things that once mystified me, but there is still always more to learn. Each intern brings with them a set of different experiences and areas of focus and challenges and gifts to the music therapy profession.

One of the things that has stuck with me from the limited amount of reading that I have done in my selected texts is that the authors (from the American Psychiatric Association) felt that the supervisors available in the psychiatric community did not have formal training. They, like us, are often thrown into the process of supervising the next generation of music therapists with little to no information about how to do the job.

There are two different types of things that happen with an internship program. There are the administrative things - reports, letters, applications, interviews and all that type of stuff - and then there are the training things - evaluations, training programs, observations, and those things that happen with interns. Both have value, and both can be complicated.

When I started off as a newbie supervisor, I attended the supervision course offered by the National Association for Music Therapy. It was about three hours of how to fill out the application to become an internship (which I had already done), and two hours of how to supervise interns. I wanted more about supervision than was offered. 

When I got onto the Association Internship Approval Committee (AIAC), one of the first things I proposed was to split the two pieces of information. Those that wanted more about supervision would get it and those who wanted to focus on how to complete the packet could attend that portion. It worked. I think it is still in operation that way now. I hope it is. The more information we can share with brand new internship supervisors, the more likely they will continue to be internship supervisors.

I had a late start this morning, so I am going to sign off here.