When one door closes

Today was my last day at work. It was surprisingly peaceful for me. Actually, the whole week was. I had originally worried that I would have a major breakdown/freak out on my last day. But instead it was spent cleaning out my desk, laughing, talking with co-workers, getting well wishes from lots of folks, lots of hugs, and food.

I will definitely miss the people I have been working with. They are a wonderful bunch, but I knew this day would come and I would have to walk away. I am so happy that I had the experience. I learned so much about life, granted it was mostly focused on the evil, but it was eye opening and I think has grown me up a lot. I think the experience will help me in the future as I am certain to have to work with similar clients in the school setting.

So now I am unemployed. I have 45 days until my internship starts and I plan to enjoy them.

In other news

Only 4 days left of work! That is so crazy! As one of the attorney's I work with pointed out, I have spent almost a fourth of my life as a social worker. But now I am leaving to face the great unknown that is the world of School Psychology. I have had so many worries these last few weeks. What if Fairfield hates me? What if I discover that I hate the job? What if I can't find work once the internship is over? I have so little faith, but yet I know that God has truly laid out this plan for my life. Although it scares me - I need to trust in Him and follow.

In the interim between jobs (I will have about 5 weeks off!) Mr. Z and I are going on a couple of trips. Going to SLO and to Chicago! Yeah! We haven't been on a real vacation since our honeymoon five years ago so this is much over due. It will be great to spend time together without the stress of work and school swimming in my head.

I used another sick day today (I can't believe how many I have left!) to get some more HR stuff done. I turned in a LARGE packet of forms, plus my TB test and the letter from my school saying I can be an intern. Then HR lady sent me off to get finger printed. She made it sound like they just need to wait a couple days for the results to return and then we can sign the contract. This was a different HR lady than I talk to last time, and she made it sound WAY easier to process than the last. So we will see which one is correct. I'm hoping it is the lady from today.

Paperwork

I had forgotten how much paperwork is required to start a new job. In the case that your new job is to be a School Psychologist Intern it apparently triples the steps necessary to finalize the job. Yesterday I stayed home sick *cough cough* from work and went to the HR department at Fairfield. There I learned that I needed to get a letter from my school saying I can be an intern in order to get a "intent to hire" letter from Fairfield. I have to have the intent to hire letter in order to apply for my internship credential. I have to have applied for my internship credential to fingerprint and I have to fingerprint in order to sign the contract. So many steps. I was also given a ginormous packet of forms to fill out. Funzies. So glad I am getting started on this now and that the HR department is open all summer.

So this week at work I turned in my letter of resignation - it was really early because my plan had been to go on Vacation as of July 6 and then burn off all my vacation making my last day around July 30. Today I was asked if I would be willing to leave earlier in order to save a job for one of the people facing layoffs. It's a tough call. My initial reaction was to agree, but my hubby, Mr. Z, has pointed out some problems with the idea and thinks that my job may have ulterior motives. Not sure what to do. Guess I will have to think/pray about it.

Restraint

Tonight I went to my exit interview to be advanced to candidacy for my school psychologist internship credential. I had expected some sort of pomp and circumstance about the process. In my head this is a BIG DEAL. We are now ready to start taking those first steps as School Psychs! It is something we have been working towards for two years. However, the evening did not meet my expectations. It turned out to be us, sitting in a back room with the program director of the psych program at a big table, sliding our work over, him sort of glancing at it, signing it, and then sliding it back. HA! Oh well, it's over and I made the cut so I guess I should be happy regardless of the lack of ceremony of my evening. So now I have to wait for the school to send stuff to the state so I can apply for my credential through CCTC. Such a complex process, I had no idea.

What a day!

What a fantastical day! My "clean-up day" at practicum was actually an uber relaxation thank you day from Mr. J. He took my classmate and I out to get a 1 hour foot massage (AMAZING) and then out to a delicious Italian lunch. As we were traveling about Mr. J warned me that, based on his experience, I shouldn't expect much to happen as a result of my applying for that internship last night. He said that our University is never given a shot at this particular district and that he himself wasn't even given an interview and he had worked at the school in a different capacity in the past. So I shrugged it off as he pretty much was confirming my own assumptions about this specific school district and figured I wouldn't hear anything back from the SD about my application. Oddly enough though, as we are walking into lunch my cell phone rings and it is the school district I just turned the application into and they want me to come in at 9am on Monday and interview. I kind of think to myself, "did I just enter the twilight zone?" and agree to be there. I shared the news of my phone call with Mr. J who also shared my shock and we sat in silence for a while, wondering what it could possibly mean...
I already feel myself tensing back up after my wonderful massage. I hate interviews, but know it will be good for me to try another one. I start creating complicated and long mental list of things I need to accomplish this weekend: there are 4 chapters to read for class plus post about, need to scan about 60 pages of documentation, need to put together my 16 section exit interview binder, need to finish the 9 page exit interview questionnaire, plus now I need to study up on environmental factors that affect learning and put together a new portfolio for the interview on Monday. The exhaustion returns to me and I just want to crawl under the table. The food, although delicious, looses it's appeal and I end up taking the majority of it home.
After lunch we have a bitter sweet goodbye at Mr. J's office. It has been a great experience and I will miss it as well as Mr. J.
I get home and hang out with my husband, filling him in on my latest internship interview that has been lined up. Then the phone rings. I figure it is just a politician, but it is someone who asks to speak with me. She introduces her self-it is Mrs. F, the special ed director of the SD I interviewed with on Wednesday (which, forever after will be named Fairfield SD). She says she has good news for me. I begin to dance around the livingroom as we speak and she tells me I did a wonderful job at my interview and she would like to offer me the position. I accept quickly and tell her how excited I am to be apart of her great team. We make plans to speak next week to arrange for a day to come out and take care of all the HR stuff.
The dancing continues and the stress diminishes.

Cleaning...

Today I am going in to my last practicum site to help the District Psych do end of the year cleaning. He assures me that this will be a great "learning experience" HA! I bet. Oh well, it was a great practicum location and I learned oodles so the least I can do is help clean up some of the mess I most likely contributed to. Mr. J (the District Psych) is also a super funny dude so I am sure that it will be entertaining. AND my co-practicum student and I got him a thank you cake - so there will also be yummy snacks. Can't go wrong then!

I turned in an application for another paid internship that was posted. This one pays EXTREMELY well, like $24/hour! The odds of me getting it are slim to none as the Special Ed BigWig of the district is the director of the competing university in town. So once he sees what graduate school I attend my application will most likely end up in the trash. But I figure, it wont hurt too much to try. And if I get an interview out of it, I will get another practice at interviewing, which although those are painful, they are good for me to get through.

Haven't heard anything about my interview from Wednesday yet. I sent a thank you note to the special ed director and am still hoping for the best. When I think about the competition out there my optimism does begin to wane a but, but I am still trying to hang on to the positive feelings I felt as I walked out of the interview. So I shall continue to wait until I hear the news. At least I know I will get the news before the end of the day next Friday, but that seems like a long while to wait.

PS - I loath waiting.

The interview

Today was the day. I got up and purdied up, and practiced my "tell us about yourself" speech. I was amazingly nervous but managed to keep it together. The panel was HUGE (4 school psychs and 1 special ed director). They asked a lot of questions, here is what I remember:

• What experience do you have that you think prepares you to be a School Psychologist Intern?
• What sort of help could you give a student coming into the 3rd grade who was new to the country from Mexico and had sporadic academic experience while in Mexico.
• How would you go about working with a teacher who is going to need to have modifications made in her classroom, that may require even more work on the teachers part, knowing that you are not a teacher.
• What would you do if a parent submitted a request in writing for the student to be assessed for learning disabilities. The student has been found to be in the 50th percentile academically via CBM?
• What's the difference between CBM and Standardized Norm based measures?
• What is a Functional Analysis and how do you do one?
• What is your experience in group and individual counseling, how competent do you feel in performing counseling.
  

There were quite a few other questions, but that's all I can recall at the moment. I actually felt like it went pretty well and that I was able to provide competent sounding answers to their questions. I actually even had quite a bit of the experience they were looking for (Functional Analysis stuff and counseling) and it seemed that my current job as a social worker was a definite plus for them. So, my fingers are crossed and now I will wait until I hear the result next week! I heard there were 13 applicants, so even though I feel I did well, it's a tough call on if I will be good enough to beat out that many others!

12 hours until go time!

Today was spent writing three court reports for work (rather productive day if I do say so myself) and interspersing that with studying for THE interview tomorrow. I looked over some math interventions (I think my favorite was cover, copy, compare - the student is given the math work with the answer, they cover up the answer, copy the problem and attempt it, then compare their answer with the correct one. You should throw in some that they have already mastered so it will keep their confidence up) and studied the levels of CELDT. It was a really good thing to review as I bet they will ask me about working with ELL students tomorrow. So in review, there are 5 levels to CELDT, 1 is the lowest level of proficiency, 5 is the highest. I still am not certain at which point you should rely on a nonverbal assessment over a typical comprehensive assessment. I would assume it would be silly to WISC a kid who was at level 1 or 2, but I am not sure about level 3. It doesn't seem like they would have the english vocab for it.I would guess that you would get a better estimate of cognitive ability from a CAS (PS I heart the CAS for working with ELL kids) or a non-verbal assessment. But that's just my assumption. Seems like level 4 and 5 you could do a comprehensive assessment and be safe.

Another thing I have done to prep myself is talking out loud some of the answers I would give to specific questions. It seems to be helping keep my stress down since my answers aren't half bad (of course they are to my own questions so perhaps this isn't the best exercise!)

Lastly, I had a fantabulous workout this evening in an attempt to tire myself out and burn off some anxiety. It was a lot of fun too! Dance Dance Revolution - if you haven't tried it, you should. It makes for an entertaining workout - although it is most fun when you have a buddy to dance with. It doesn't make you feel as silly.