Being an Internship Director: Getting Ready for the Next One
That's not much time, especially because it is the end of our regular school year. There are so many things to do before #36 arrives, but most of them have nothing to do with music therapy or the internship program. I have started my "end-of-the-year" post-its with categories of "internship," "Talent Show," "cleaning," and "other."
I was able to knock off a bunch of tasks on Friday - I wanted to rearrange the intern office/storage room to accommodate the new desk. The effort spent on those tasks led to my intense pain on Friday afternoon, but I moved the storage cabinet and the desk where I wanted them to end up. I labeled all sorts of things, and felt like I had made some progress.
This week's planning/prep time will be taken up with Talent Show preparation (so far, no need to move the drum set down to the gym on Friday - keep your fingers crossed because today is the deadline for the Talent Show forms!!). I am having to conceptualize how we are going to get the music loud enough for people to hear all over the gym, but I have an idea to test out to see if I can do this with my sub-standard music equipment.
But, I digress. The purpose of this post is to talk about being an internship director.
Over the past two and a half months, I have started using the intern office/storage space as more of a storage space than an empty office. It is easy to place things in that space without returning them to their proper locations. I am also using that space as a place to work on task boxes and file folders for classrooms. That will continue as I want to encourage my interns to create things as well.
I have been reviewing bits and pieces of the paperwork that I include as part of my program. The task that I have been avoiding (and will continue to avoid until after the Talent Show) is changing the internship handbook to reflect the new tract options for my interns. That will be the largest task, but other things are coming along. I started the assignment calendar for #36 last week. I also uploaded all of the resources that will not change to a shared Google folder. I haven't shared it with #36 yet - the intern is taking final finals right now and doesn't need more information to sort through, but I will be sharing that folder with #36 the last week of our school session.
The next part of my intern preparation is telling students that a new intern is arriving. Some students have already heard, but not everyone. So, I will spend some time casually mentioning that a new intern will be arriving during summer school. There will be some hopeful looks and comments about wanting me to leave, and there will just as many concerned looks and comments about whether I am leaving. I find that this is an important aspect to having an intern come to the facility.
Interns change things. That is a good thing but can be concerning for those who live on schedules and consistency. Changes are not always easy for my clients, so having an opportunity to ease into a therapeutic relationship with interns is essential. My interns spend the first month as observers and then take over their caseload slowly - one TME at a time. This gives the interns a chance to ease into full session leadership and allows clients to get used to the idea of the interns being the group leader with my blessing. (It amuses me to see how many of my clients are concerned when interns touch the clinic guitar!) We then go through a process of my physical withdrawal from the interns' groups - I start to sit farther and farther away until I am in my office, observing.
It is almost time to head to work. I am going to leave later than usual today - just because I can. I have to get gas for the car before heading out of town, so I am shooting for a 6:20 am departure, but the "you're going to be late" whispers in the back of my head are starting, so I might leave earlier. Who am I kidding, I'm going to be leaving earlier. I want to take the big bag of veggie straws to work for snacking purposes, and I have a bag of rolls that I will take with a jar of peanut butter for lunch. Once I get to work, I have documentation to do, a country presentation for this week, and talent show stuff to start arranging. Today is a four group, four individual day, so things will be busy around my music therapy room. There is little to no time to get internship stuff done, but I will keep working on my post-it tasks so things will get finished up before #36 arrives on the first day of our summer session.
Happy Monday.
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