music, therapy, and me

I am happy to announce that I have published the next chapter of my Music Therapy Internship Handbook in my TPT store. If you are new here, I would like you to know that I am writing a general music therapy internship handbook - one chapter at a time. This chapter, Settling Into the Role of Music Therapy Intern , joins the three other chapters which cover finding an internship, preparing for the first day, and the first day of the music therapy internship experience. All of those chapters can be found in my TPT store . I am enjoying this experience. I have always been more fascinated with how we do the process of music therapy than any other part of our jobs. The internship seems to be a mystery to music therapy students - it was when I started looking for my internship, and it still seems to be difficult to find information. Eventually, I would love for music therapy students to use this handbook when they start looking for their internships.  I am trying to cover some of the minu...

I spent time working on Chapter Two of my internship handbook - Becoming a Music Therapy Intern: Preparing for Your First Day of Your Internship this weekend, and I released it yesterday. This is a project that I have been working on for a long time. I have wanted to do some sort of internship manual since I started supervising music therapy students and interns. It came out mainly because it seems that many interns (at least, the ones I have encountered in all sorts of places) do not know some of the specific rights and responsibilities that they have and that their supervising music therapists and academic faculty members have. I have been writing this resource for a very long time, and I finally woke up to the fact that I can self-publish bits rather than waiting for the entire thing to be released at the same time. So, I have started. I am using my TPT store as the initial platform for release because it is easy for me to use. As I get more chapters, I will either bundle them or ...

I am finally accomplishing something that I have been working on for a very long time. Isn't it interesting when you finally take a gulp and do the thing that has been on your to-do list for years??  Let me explain... For years, I have been offering webinars and networking with music therapy students and interns. One of the recurring themes that has happened over the years is that interns are not well-prepared for the experience prior to applying to internships. There are some folks who are surprised by the fact that they have to do an internship. There are others who feel overwhelmed by the entire experience from application to graduation. I don't think that any music therapy student should start looking for an internship without a foundation of knowledge about the process and the experience itself. So, I am writing an internship handbook to help students understand what is going on in this process. I released the first chapter, Becoming a Music Therapy Intern: Finding Your In...

It is Monday, and time to talk about music therapy internship things. I will be hosting a visitor on Thursday who might become an applicant later on. So, I guess my thoughts about closing things down will have to wait a bit more. We will see. The primary purpose of this post is to advertise a new resource out there for music therapy students. This is the first chapter in an internship handbook that I have been writing for a long time, and I released it out into the world on Saturday. Please consider buying it, if you are a music therapy student who wants more information about getting an internship placement. It is available in my TPT store at this link . It includes a way of organizing information and a reproducible form for use. It is also only $2.50 USD. I hope to have the next part up by next Saturday - How to Prepare for Your Internship Once You Have One (title is a work in progress). This is a labor of love for me. I am constantly amazed about what music therapy interns do and do...

I am not an internship supervisor at the moment. I am on hiatus, and I have been enjoying the solitary existence. I have been rearranging my storage areas without having to worry about the work spaces of others, and I am reveling in the opportunity to think through things without having to explain them. At the moment, I am also thinking about my next round of interns while I am waiting for current applicants to finish their applications. I have several of them, but none of the applications are complete at this point. All of them are waiting on a letter of reference... well, except for the two who have letters of reference but no application. It is interesting what things are revealed to me in the application process, but I digress. I decided to re-up my AMTA membership at a tier that I felt was comfortable for me just so I could accept interns in this calendar year. I still feel the pull towards training and mentoring, but I am not as enthusiastic about our professional organization th...

It is here - the return of my nostalgia posts where I look back at a blog post that I wrote a bit ago. I select these posts using a random number generator, and today, I decided that I would start to select the number once I reached 24 seconds of number generation. Today's number is 3314 - a post from August 2023 - a recent look back.  This post is all about the topic meetings that I strive to use during the time interns are with me (- and, it reminds me of a project that I wanted to get finished for my fellow intern supervisors that I never started. Add it to the list of things that I want to do). We did some of these topics, my former intern and I, but we did not do them the two times that I would like to do with every intern. This is my way of ensuring that we talk about the administrative tasks that are part of being a full-time music therapy clinician. During topic meetings, we address how to do things that I do all the time. I would like to flesh this series out a bit more a...

Today is my first day of winter break for 2023, and I allowed myself to go back to sleep (fortunately, without the nightmares that often happen when I go back to sleep) and lay about in bed for a bit longer than usual. I am now up and ready to start the next two days of at home break time. The first day of winter break is always a time where I make lots of plans for future me to accomplish. I rarely complete any of those plans. I have things that I need to get done, including cleaning the kitchen. I also need to do laundry, pack a bag, and prepare for the rest of my winter break. I am starting my task list and am getting ready to start things off after I post this essay. Lately, my thoughts have been taken over by thoughts about how people learn. I have really been focused on current music therapy students and interns because that is who I work with in my music therapy job. This is probably going to sound a bit preachy or critical, and I am not going to apologize for that tone - mainly...

I have been through some interesting experiences over the past two weeks, but I am trying to see if what I am asking my interns to do is too much. I sat down and calculated the amount of time that my interns spend in direct leadership, in observation, and how much time I am expecting for them to use in session documentation.  In their 42.5 hour work week, they are leading 9 hours of sessions. They are observing another 6 hours of sessions. I anticipate about 40 minutes per group for documentation so, the amount of time for documentation varies from day to day but should take no longer than 6 hours per week for documentation (that is lots of time for documentation, but it still adds up to just over half the time at the facility per week for direct clients services). That leaves 21.5 hours. We have one hour per week for consultation and about 2 hours per week for meetings - taking us down to 18.5 hours left for practicing and assignments. To me, that seems to be lots of time to get t...

Yesterday, our President, Joe Biden, announced some student loan forgiveness amounts of money and another delay on people having to pay their payments. So many people have so many opinions about this situation. I can tell you that my opinion is that student loan forgiveness is needed at this moment but I have some emotions that are coming up with this situation. That emotion is JEALOUSY! To afford my foray into graduate study, I had to take out some student loans. I had to give up my full-time job to complete a residency requirement for my failed doctorate study, so I had to take out all the loans that I was offered in order to live. My tuition was paid for for that year, but that year only during my education. I did not graduate with my Ph.D. (long story about why, but leave it here by saying that I am not disappointed), but that one year of being a full-time student left me with lots of student debt. I spent most of my graduate study career both paying student loan payments and tuiti...

It is Friday, and this is a late post because I FINALLY GOT SOME SLEEP! I fell asleep around 7:30 last night and slept until 3am, got up and used the bathroom, watched some videos until 5 and then flipped over and slept again until 7:45. I have a little less than an hour to get ready for an eye examination and blog and all that. I am still exhausted, but at least I was able to sleep for an extended amount of time. Having the occasional night where I do not get much sleep is not completely unusual for me, but two nights in a row is VERY unusual. I blame my depression (appears that I do this every summer with high temperatures and soggy air) and my current emotional state for all of this. Yesterday, I had a couple of wins. I was able to change a system where I really was getting screwed over as well as acknowledgement of a service delivery system that I organized for our new vocational program. I'm not sure that anyone other than the two of us who discussed this know that it is my sy...

It is time to go back to work after a week off for Spring Break. I am nervous about going back - I always am when I have a new intern starting. I have been up since a little before 3am, and I am starting to feel the "get there early" twinges of anxiety starting to rear their ugly heads. It is WAY too early for that, but I still am feeling those twinges. It has been a long time since I have had two interns at the same time - about a year now. I do this every so often when I need to take a break from being supervisor and to simply be therapist. I had offered a position to someone last year who would have filled up my time, but that person declined the offer, so I left it open. The second time frame where I could have had an intern was a time that I really needed to be therapist again, so I did not fill up the available spot. This is one of the tricks that I have to keep myself from burning out - taking time away from supervision in order to be therapist again. I have lots of in...

It is time to start getting back into a work frame of mind. I have been away from my job for the past week while on Spring Break. Since I haven't been at work, I have tried to embrace the idea of not thinking too much about the things that happen as part of my job, but it is time to start getting my focus back. I go back to my full time job on Monday, so I need to start thinking about what is coming up this week at work. On Monday morning, my next intern will arrive to start his internship. I am feeling my regular jitters about all of this - every time I accept an intern, every time an intern is getting ready to start, and every time I am sitting in the lobby waiting for that intern to arrive, I have jitters. You would think that it would become a bit less of a deal after 33 of these folks, but it is still part of my process. As I prepare for another new intern, there are things that I have to get coordinated. One of the things that I need to do is to establish a shared drive on Go...

Two years ago, I was in the middle of some sort of mystery illness. I had been tested for Influenza (all sorts of types), and I did not feel fluish, but I did not feel well, either. This was before our world shut down, and who knows if what I had was COVID or not, but the timing was pretty interesting. I did not have nearly as many symptoms as listed on the information from the CDC at that time, and I don't think it was COVID, but it remains a mystery nonetheless. I will always wonder if that illness was COVID. I did not hear anything about COVID until March 13th when my school shut down for COVID when we all shut down. The idea of a global pandemic was not on my radar at all. I avoided all things news-related because I got too angry with decisions made by leadership and the results of all of those decisions. It was better for my mental health not to engage in consuming news. I still avoid most of the news, but things are a bit better for my health these days.  In the past (almost)...

It is Monday. I was going to start this post with a title that included the word "exhaustion," but that's really the theme of life at the moment, so I decided not to focus on feeling tired and on getting ready for this week. This is the busiest week of my year, everyone. It is Online Conference for Music Therapy week, so my life will be taken over by last minute registration questions, trying to keep myself from losing it when other people make demands on my time and my process, and combating the stress that comes from having to do my parts of the conference. It is a difficult time for all of us who run the conference - anyone who tells you that running a conference is easy is seriously lying to you! I get very frustrated by the people who "forget" to register and then complain when they do not get information. I get very frustrated by those who seem to think that rules and deadlines are not meant for them. I tend to get very frustrated by those who do not read ...

There is a power differential that happens in an internship program. This power differential is not unique to music therapy, in fact, this happens in every single profession. There are always power differentials. Someone always has more power than me. Even as a small business owner, there are people and entities out there that have more power than I do. Power differentials ALWAYS exist. I am in a position of power as an internship director. I am acutely aware of this fact and strive to ensure that there is always this imbalance that occurs between myself and my interns. I do my best to make sure that I do not abuse this imbalance. I try to encourage my interns to understand that there are things that I will not do because they are my students and because I am required to be their supervisor. There are also things that I have to do, for the exact same reason. I find it extremely funny when my interns ask me not to judge them. (It happens with each intern at least once.) That is literall...

I have come to a realization. I am not going to be able to do my "regular" routine of training interns for a bit because "pandemic educated" interns are different from my last batch of interns which were "went through mostly live music therapy experiences but then had the internship thing interrupted by a global pandemic" interns. Let me explain. I have a new intern. This new intern has been with me for two whole days now and has seen me do one day of live music therapy sessions with clients. This intern, who I will call 33, mentioned that it was great to observe live interactions. That started me thinking, and I asked - 33 saw live music therapy interactions during the first practicum semester and then had to go virtual for all other interactions after that. Hmmm. So, this means that my next several interns will have less direct service interaction experience and lots more telehealth interaction experience. Now, I knew that, but it is much more relevant w...