Summary of Experience
During the Spring 2017 semester, I was a School Counselor intern at Chariho Regional High School. Here I completed various tasks such as assisting students with scheduling and meeting with Seniors to discuss their post-high school plans; including their progress in the college admissions process or, if they were not planning on attending college, what path they planned on taking and how they were going to get there. I also created a list of available rooms in which the SAT could be held and then subsequently assigned students to those rooms. I took the scheduling sheets the incoming Freshmen handed in and sorted them according to who their future counselor was going to be. After, I distributed these sheets to each respective counselor so they would know what students they were going to be working with in the coming years. Aside from doing these tasks, I also had the opportunity to sit in on various meetings such as School Counseling Department meetings, credit recovery meetings, transfer student meetings, as well as meetings parents scheduled in order to discuss their child's academics. As you will see under the tab labeled "Chariho Regional High School" I, additionally, worked on supplemental material for tasks I am going to face in my career as a School Counselor. These included mock letters of recommendation and a mock packet on the college admissions process for Juniors as well as a presentation on suicide awareness that I am planning on presenting next semester to the study body of Chariho.
During my time at Chariho Regional High School, I definitely learned and grew a lot. First, I learned how to use the online system called PowerSchool. I learned how to use it to schedule students, look up their past and previous grades, and how to find information from the master schedule in order to create rooms for the SAT, among other things. By sitting in on meetings, I had the opportunity to learn about different situations I could encounter as a School Counselor and how to approach them. In terms of my own personal and professional growth, I gained a lot more confidence as a result of interning at Chariho. In the beginning, I was nervous to meet with students and discuss things with them because I did not want to miss any important points that I had to address. However, as time went on, I became more comfortable and had no problem meeting with all different types of students with different situations. I am going to be able to carry this newfound confidence on with me through graduate school and into my career thanks to my internship at Chariho.
My most significant accomplishment was definitely when I helped lay a student's schedule out for their remaining two years of high school on my own. I achieved this goal by observing my supervisor lay out the schedule's for a countless number of students who were in a certain program that made it difficult for them to fit in all their required courses. I also took note of the things she did to make their schedules work. After observing and taking note of what my supervisor said and did, I was able to complete this task on my own. By completing this task, I learned that I was fairly proficient in the requirements of the school and that I could aid students who had unique circumstances. In the beginning of my internship, I found myself having to refer back to documents that stated the requirements students needed for graduation and the classes that would fulfill those requirements. However, once I laid out this given student's schedule, I knew that I had began to become more accustomed to the requirements, could remember them off the top of my head, and subsequently complete my work in a more efficient manner.
In conclusion, my internship at Chariho Regional High School has undeniably influenced my future goals and growth as a professional. It has helped me confirm that I am on the right path and that this is the field I would like to enter. Professionally, I am one step closer to my final goal. I now know some things to expect as a School Counselor and I can take the lessons I learned during my time at Chairho and apply them to my future endeavors. I now know how to approach different types of meetings, and different protocol to follow in certain situations, among other things. Thanks to my internship at Chariho, I am now ready to move forward and continue growing as a professional, gaining as much experience as possible that will help me as I enter the work force after graduate school.