Being An Internship Supervisor: Planning for Vacations

This year, I will be taking a work trip while my future intern is just a bit over a month into her internship. I will be gone for an entire week, and knowing my co-workers, I do not want her to be the sole music therapist in the facility. She will be pushed to do things that are not part of her volunteer role in the facility and will be expected to accommodate the needs of others in ways that she will not be prepared to do in that first month. In addition, being someone who is drawn to being a therapist, she will probably be too nice to say no, so that sort of thing makes all sorts of problems.

My solution?

She will work from home that week.

The problem?

I do not know exactly what she will be doing. The good news is that I have about two months to figure it out (and I do have an idea), but I have to figure it all out. 

Taking vacations while being an internship supervisor is perfectly fine. There is absolutely no difficulty with taking and using the time that you have accrued in order to refresh while you have an intern. If I have to be gone, the art therapist is the person that oversees my interns, but I want to do some different things this time around.

One of the things that I am trying to do is to compress the internship into six months instead of seven. I have always done a seven month internship because I work in a school setting. By having interns around for seven months, they were able to get in the 122 days of work and have breaks when the school calendar indicated. I am looking into offering an option for interns to work from home during the school calendar breaks. If interns take that option, then their time with me can be shortened to six months. It's not a big change, but it can decrease some of the financial burden placed on interns.

Like I said, I have some ideas on how to do this, I just need to get going with my planning. I don't want to say much more about the plan, because I tend to find that people come up with the same exact plan as soon as I reveal my own, but I am excited about this model for my internship. I think it will be good for my interns. I will continue to plan and prepare for intern #36, but I will also be adapting things for her to accommodate that time when I will be away.

We do not have any provisions for virtual sessions at my facility. The classrooms do not have Zoom capabilities, and we have not done any sort of livestream sessions during the past three years. We do have a YouTube channel, and that will figure into some of the tasks for my intern to do while I am gone, but not all of it.

One thing that I did not bring on this trip is my ideas book. That's unfortunate because I have ideas now with no place to put them. I guess I will have to make something or take something. I may be able to find some paper here at home that Mom will not miss. 

This type of creative inspiration happens each time I come home. Being surrounded by Mom's stuff just makes my brain go into creative overdrive. My bullet journal doesn't have many unclaimed pages in it, so it is difficult to put things in that book at the moment. I guess I can use the pages in the back and just switch to a different journal at an earlier date than planned. 

It is okay to change my mind.

Back to the original topic of this post - planning for vacations.

There is space in how internship supervisors can take vacations and leave interns alone at the facility. If #36 were in their fourth or later month of internship, I would be more apt to have them be the "therapist" at the facility in my absence, but not in the middle of what will be month two. So, I will have tasks for them to do that are competency-based, future-minded, and ready to go when I have to leave for parts up North.

More about those tasks when we get closer to departure.

Happy Monday, all!