Personal Statement Of Purpose: A Career As A Clinical Assistant

Humans are fascinating creatures. When I was a young girl, I remember being curious about peoples behaviors. I often found myself asking questions. This, as s a child, frequently got me into trouble, but I was not discouraged and my curiosity grew as I got older. When I was in eighth grade, I discovered the brilliant subject of psychology, the study of behavior and the mind. I was hooked, from that moment I knew that psychology was the field for me. Currently, I am a junior and am a year away from obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology. My future professional goal is to obtain a PhD in psychology and, ultimately, to become a clinical psychologist. I am actively invested in my academic career and ideally would like to graduate by spring

I’ve been in college/university campuses for probably about twenty-eight years. I’ve been here at Sacramento State for two, a little over, years. My role right now… I’m what’s called a Clinical Director, I head the counseling portion of the Student Health and Counseling Service. So, I have a total of nine, counselor/ therapists that work under my direction and I provide support to them, administrative service, and manage the psychological end of the counselors. Student Health and Counseling Service is an integrated facility, we have our primary health and our counseling and psych services. We have our health and wellness unit, as well as our dietetic and nutritionists, all are housed under one umbrella. So, I head the psychological services section. Our mission obviously is providing for the emotional and mental health needs of students at Sac State and to basically help them do what they have to do and help them to be able to graduate and be successful and all that. A lot of it is working with students who are experiencing various difficulties, anxieties, depression and things that are getting in the way of their education. We also do a lot of positive programing; we offer a lot of group and mindfulness training. We are proactive to try to help students enhance their skill and abilities and to be a little more resilient in their university

I write a lot of reports internally, but also a lot of reports that go to the Vice President of Student Services and reports that go to other departments we are working with, memoranda’s of understanding between us and different departments. I write a lot of evaluations for my staff and that kind of things. So probably a lot, I’d say, maybe, five out of the eight hours of my day are spent writing. When I do the clinical work, which is about twenty-five percent of my day, I do progress notes, to keep rather detailed therapy notes and that kind of thing, to meet the legal requirements of accredited bodies and licensing boards. Our profession these days, like most, is pretty highly regulated and so there are a lot of requirements of how we document things. We do most of this electronically, through a medical record keeping system, it’s a large electronic system, it has various templates and you have to fill out each