Grad School!

I'm happy to report some positive developments in my life over the past six weeks. During a recent trip to Chicago, I had the grad school "ah-ha!" moment that I had been looking to have for a long time. While chatting with my friends at Katie and Chuck's Chesterton home, we got on the subject of Valpo having a M. Ed for school counseling. Frankly, I'm surprised that I had not given this much thought before as I have come to see more and more that what I like about working in a school is not academic instruction, but processing issues with kids (in fact, when it comes right down to it, I now know that I really don't want to be a teacher).

Well, once I got back to SD, I jumped on the Valpo website to check out what their program was all about. I'm not planning on going back there, but I thought that it would be a good place to start the process of looking into what a grad program might look like. This was followed up with a Google search that brought me to the UNC Chapel Hill website. After reading about their program, I just went "YES! This is what I have been looking for." Again, I'm not saying anything about where I am going, but the way the site described what a counselor does got me really excited about the possibility of becoming a school counselor.

So, now I have been doing some work on finding different programs in places which I might like to live. Seattle, Minneapolis, New Mexico, the UNC program...I feel that I have options. Luckily, I have a strong undergraduate GPA as well as good work experience/references. The only unknown is my GRE score, which I am now planning on taking early in the fall. Then I will have a clear picture of where I can apply to. As long as I can pull out a decent score, I should be sitting pretty.