Fourth Year: Commence!

Hola!

It's kind of startling how quickly the summer blew right by.  It's September, and fourth year has begun.  In spite of the fact that I'm quite tired and am still, STILL at old externship and have actually expanded my clinical responsibilities to four sites (being overworked: Now with testing!!),  I'm feeling weirdly optimistic about the next year.  This makes me suspicious, which should tell you something about the emotional abuse that is graduate school.

Let's take a look at what the next year holds:

Fall Semester:
--Continuing new externship
--Continuing to work with clients at school
--Ending at old externship (hopefully before October)
--Defending dissertation proposal (also before October)
--Starting to collect dissertation data
--Applying to internship, which will include:

• Writing really annoying essays, like "personal statements"
• Requesting and securing letters of recommendation
• Tallying up (literally) every single hour of clinical stuff I've done since beginning my training
• Identifying a list of cool-sounding sites from a dizzyingly hard-to-navigate database

Spring Semester:
--Continuing externship
--God willing: Going on internship interviews
--Enduring Match Day and, double-God willing: Matching somewhere (do I dare qualify that with somewhere I like?)
--Completing dissertation data collection
--Commencing senioritis while hopefully not becoming a complete and utter waste of life

Summer:
--Depending on when (triple-God willing) internship starts, actually maybe possibly having a summer that doesn't include 50-60 hour work weeks
--Defending dissertation if I haven't already in the spring

...I will now acknowledge that, after forcing myself to write that list and thereby do some reality testing about what the next year will look like, I'm kind of having heart palpitations.  This is in part because I made the HORRIBLE, INEXCUSABLE mistake of looking at SDN threads on internship applications (people were seriously working on this shit in June???) and am now having to actively regulate my breathing. 

The thing is, (some) people tend to treat this kind of thing like a goddamned arms race, like the first one to perfect all of their essays and hone their list of sites wins, like they want to be able to declare with absolute certainty "My CV could blow up your CV 7 times!!" 

 
Though ironically we are budding mental health professionals, no one has a knack for actually ratcheting up anxiety in others and themselves to thoroughly non-therapeutic ends like frenzied, application-obsessed psychology graduate students.  Especially psychology graduate students on the internet.  I know this will be the case this year, even before fully launching my own internship application industrial complex, because grad school makes you apply for stuff constantly and people love to talk about it all over semi-anonymous websites.  Since internship is the be-all end-all of grad school, this application cycle will surely involve the hysteria of, say, externship applications, with PCP liberally sprinkled on it.

Gah.

Okay: Cue the reframe.

Applying for stuff is exhausting, yes.  But it's also something, as a psych grad student, we're all old hands in.  I've written a million cover letters and personal statements before--evidently winning ones, because here I am.  I've gone on interviews and snagged effective letters of recommendations.  I've had to travel to visit programs while simultaneously juggling other responsibilities.  It's not heaven on Earth, but it's not total hell either.  In its own way, it's kind of exhilarating.  It's shopping for your future life.  And the future is no more grad school.

Yes, best of all: Applying for internship means I'm almost done.

Holy shit guys.  I'm so almost done I can taste it.  I'm so almost done I can just feel actually getting paid for the work I do, and not having classes, only having to be in maybe like two places every week instead of 18, and like... having autonomy. 

So much of the velocity of my head-spinning over the last three years has been generated by this painful awareness that I have precious control over my own life.  I know in an intergalactic sense the notion that I have control over anything that happens to me is cute, hilarious, and naive, but it would just be so nice to have more say in what my day-to-day life looks like than any grad student could possibly expect to have.  Which is no say.  No say at all.

In summary: yes, the next year will be hard, stressful, and anxiety-inducing.  At times, it'll be very, very difficult.  But, as I've perhaps foolishly boasted before, I can do difficult.  Unlike even a few months ago, I now feel so clearly that each step I take is a step toward freedom.  The life I want is just around the corner, and I'm finally close enough that I can hear it calling.

Quadruple-God willing.

In the tiny eye of storm that is this weekend, I plan to finally write my now-assuredly-epic summer revue post.  Keep your eyes peeled.

{Heart}