Being An Internship Director: Week Two of New Intern Time

#36 has finished training and will be in music therapy for the rest of her time at the facility. This will be #36's first full week in the music therapy room, and this week will be full of teaching names and introducing clients to #36. We are going to be exploring our country of the month - Sweden - this week, so there will be lots of video watching and opportunities to talk about cultures.

This introduction time is always interesting. Students think that I am leaving because I am introducing them to someone new. Others have been through the routine, so they are not as responsive to a new person in our environment. This week is for observation and getting familiar with our routine.

My internship program is set up to provide lots of observation time during the first month of an intern's time with us. I want interns to feel like they have a good idea what we do before they start doing what we do. By the end of this month, #36 will be starting the process of taking over some of the music therapy responsibilities in the assigned caseload. By the end of the next month, the intern should be leading most of the groups on the caseload and will be starting to work with individuals.

Well, that's what SHOULD happen. We will see if that actually happens. The difficulty with starting an intern during our summer sessions is that we have lots of interruptions in our work weeks for our various summer breaks. A "month" is less of a calendar-based situation and more of a work-day type of situation. The months that I am referring to are based on a set structure of the number of days worked - we have 122 days per internship, so I divide that by six and that is my way of designating what a "month" is for the purposes of organization.

One of the things that happens during this week is that I get to know the intern a bit more. The first week for #36 meant lots of training, so there was limited music therapy time last week. This will be the first week of meeting clients and getting involved in music therapy. We will have time to talk about all sorts of things this week. I will show #36 the process of setting up individual treatment schedules because I did not get that finished up before the end of last week. Ah - the joys of administrative duties.

The most difficult part of this week is remembering to explain things that I do not usually talk about. I don't often talk about my processes of doing things, so I struggle, at times, with explanations of how I do what I do and why I do it in a particular way. Often, there isn't a particular reason for how I do things, so being asked questions by interns helps me figure out why I do things. When I have no clear answer for something, I am prompted to think about why I do things in that manner. There isn't a clear answer for many things - other than instinct.

More on that later. For the moment, I have to take my still sick body into work to do the internship stuff. I am in day 23 of this ick. I hate it, but I have nothing else that I can do except continue to go through it all. Poor intern #36 - coming into the internship with an internship director who can't breathe and just wants to go home...