Being An Internship Supervisor: It's The Most Difficult Time of the Year - But Just For Me

I have entered the season of boredom as an internship supervisor - the intern is doing their full caseload, and I am on light duty. These two things are combining to my time during every intern's time with me where I am no longer "therapist" for the group but am "lady sitting in that room, occasionally yelling things." This is not my favorite time as a music therapist, let me tell you!

I am on the brink of making some decisions about my internship program. I am not sure that my program can sustain two interns at the same time anymore. We have recently lost another classroom, so we now serve our client caseload in eleven groups. This is down from fifteen groups four years ago. Since the pandemic, we have not been able to have a full census due to lack of staff members, so our school has shrunk as well. In addition, our population is not an easy one to work with, so our teachers are moving on to new jobs in other districts where there is more funding and better staff to student ratios and less chances for being hurt by violent clients. I can't blame them for moving on, but I find that these situations lead to more difficulty for those of us who are sticking it out. These things happening outside of the music therapy room are leading me to change my view of my internship program.

One of the things that I like about being a National Roster internship is that I have the ability to change how my internship program is run based on what I can and cannot do and what I want to do with interns. If I decide to only accept one intern per training year, I can do that. If I want to accept two at the same time, I can. If I don't want to accept anyone, I can do that as well.

I have some freedom here.

I love it when interns can work together. I like having two at the same time who can work with each other and serve as models and coaches for one another, but my facility is not making this easy on me with closing classrooms and empty group session times. I am struggling to find enough clinical hours for my one intern right now, and I cannot figure out how I could get two interns working with the level of independence that I feel is necessary for their transformations from "students" to "therapists" with my current schedule.

So, it means that it is time to do some thinking about what I want to do with my interns. Do I change the number of groups that they are assigned in favor of content creation? Do we offer different opportunities to our clients that we haven't been able to do before? Do we make special themed programming for our classrooms to access when they can? There are many different possibilities, but there really aren't many things that give my interns the experiences that I want them to have while they are with me.

So, that leads me to deeper questions. Is is time to close my internship program? Do I feel like I am teaching what I think my interns need to know? Am I hopelessly old-fashioned when it comes to wanting my interns to do what I want them to do? Questions just keep coming.

I need to move on from this topic this morning, but know that I will not be finished with thinking about it all. Perhaps I will have an update next week, but probably not. We will see what goes on.