Being An Internship Director: Termination in a Place Where the Therapist Does Not Make Decisions about Client Placement

This is the last week for intern #35, so we have been preparing clients for next Tuesday when intern #35 is no longer in the music therapy room. We do not have any say about when our clients attend our facility or when they leave our facility, so we cannot go through the process of termination with clients. So, we do the termination thing with interns.

We start the talk about three weeks before the intern graduates, and we term the leaving as "graduation." Many of my students have been around when our older students have graduated from our program, so that concept is usually pretty understandable for my clients.

The responses to the intern's announcements vary from "Nooooo. Stay. MJ can leave," through "So??" and "Yay!" There is nothing more simultaneously uplifting and degrading than telling a bunch of adolescents that you are leaving them. Next Tuesday, when it is just me, there will be many questions - there always are questions, but we will be able to talk about what intern #35 said during our termination sessions.

I will be in all sessions this week - time to prepare for taking over therapy for everyone again. I've been organizing my schedule and session strategies and all that in preparation. We will be going back to a weekly theme of sorts. This allows me to have some focus for our therapy services while providing some flexibility in how we interact with one another. We will be bringing back the Musician of the Month with a bit of a twist. We also are currently working on exploring other countries, so that will be a focus as well. The other two weeks will include a music education concept of some sort and exposure to different instruments. I will link the instruments to the countries, if I can, but I don't have lots of options when it comes to instruments from specific cultures in my storage. The point is that my existence without an intern is different than my existence with an intern.

Intern #36 will start at the beginning of our summer session. I have three months to organize my space, get back into the swing of full-time therapist, and figure out what #36 will have to do. Interns #32-35 have taught me some lessons (as did interns #1-31), and I now have some time to work on updating and changing things within the program without the pressures of having an intern present. I need to tweak some of my policies and change some of my assignments. That will be my focus for the next several months.

I spend some time at the end of each intern's time with me in contemplation and revision. I make changes as necessary to adapt my program to new ideas or to focus on different aspects of the clinical existence. There are times when I change all sorts of things and others where I don't change much at all. This time around, there are some things on my "to be changed" list that I need to refine.

One of the things that I am going to do is rearrange my storage closet/intern office. I want to use the space in there for my task box and file folder creation station. I want to get that stuff out of my primary office and into the storage space. The intern desks will change a bit. I want to get one more small desk table and then use the card table that I have had since 1999 (I put the date on it!) for my laminator and craft station. I have a couple of bookshelves that need to be used more frequently, so those will become part of the configuration and planning. I want to use that room for more than just storage and a place for interns. It has to be a place that gets regular use so no one at the facility thinks that I don't need that space. I will be spending some time moving things around. Also, my visual aid storage system needs some refining. The aids are all in boxes, but the boxes aren't organized yet. So, I have a couple of projects to fill my time before #36 arrives.

I have two interviews arranged for the beginning of March, so intern #36 will probably be joined by #37 in either August or September. Before that happens, though, I have intern #35 to get going and off into the professional world. I started my checklists and envelope sticky notes so I will be prepared on Friday to go through the routine of checking the intern out of the program. For now, though, it is time to head out into the world of lasts for my intern. 

See you tomorrow.