Emily Whittaker
Practicum Experience
Metamorphose Counselling and Consultation Ltd.
During the fall semester of 2022 at UFV, I was given the opportunity to take another step towards my goal of becoming a therapist — I was offered a 3-month internship at Metamorphose Counselling and Consultation Ltd. During my time at Metamorphose, I worked as an administrative intern. This position gave me a firsthand learning experience in a counselling environment, as I was given the opportunity to meet many clients from all walks of life. As I worked with clients, I learned more about what brings people to seek out counselling.
​
I chose Metamorphose Counselling as my place of work because the company's values of diversity, multiculturalism and inclusion align with my own beliefs about cultural awareness and sensitivity in counselling. At Metamorphose, much of our social media and newsletter content were made to be as inclusive as possible, as well as putting effort towards embracing and accommodating for diversity in our clients.
​
Metamorphose Counselling and Consultation Ltd: https://www.metacounselling.com/
​
Skills Learned Through Practicum Experience
Interviewing Skills
The main responsibility of my administrative work at Metamorphose was to answer calls and emails from potential clients and practicum students. Most of the time, these people would be interested in counselling with us. If a client expressed interest in starting counselling with us, my job was to conduct a short intake interview with them to begin the process. During intakes, I would collect clients' basic personal information and inquire about what they were looking to gain from counselling — Why did they decide to seek out counselling? What goals would they like to achieve through counselling? Through these intakes, I was able to practice and improve upon my interviewing skills in an authentic counselling-based environment. I was taking a beginner's counselling and interviewing skills class alongside my practicum, and I was able to put my learning to the test as I developed my speaking and listening skills.
Creative Skills
My secondary job as an administrative intern was to create social media content for the company's Instagram page. Each week, I was given the task of researching a topic related to mental health and creating an educational post about it. Each month, we had different themes to follow, such as anxiety, trauma, and identity. Besides following these themes, I was given full creative freedom with picking my topics and designing the posts. Through creating posts each week, I improved upon my research skills by learning how to tell if an information source is reliable, and developing my overall knowledge on the mental health topics I researched each week. I also faced the challenge of sometimes having to write about professional research in a manner that was easy-to-read and free of jargon so that it was accessible to our social media audience. On one occasion, I was given the opportunity to practice my writing skills on a real-world event; I wrote a piece for the company's official newsletter on the Iranian protests of 2022. While researching and writing were both pre-existing skills I had through doing my undergraduate studies in psychology, I never had any creative experience in designing images for social media. Though I struggled at first, I eventually became comfortable in creating my own designs and learned how to create images that were appealing to an audience and would attract new followers.
Referrals
One common experience in being a counsellor that often gets overlooked is the responsibility to care for one's clients, even if one is incapable of directly helping them. If a counsellor believes that they are not able to provide adequate help to a client, they are obligated to refer that client to someone else who may be better suited to help. As part of my experience in working at a counselling organization, I was given the opportunity to undergo the referral process with clients who were not suitable for our counsellors. A few of the clients who came to me were unable to work with us due to extraneous factors such as their age or location. When this happened, my supervisor taught me how to write up a referral for these clients. I learned how to search through counsellor directories for counsellors who could be a good match for each client, based on the issues they needed help with and other factors such their preferences for the counsellor's gender and ethnicity. After finding several good matches, I would provide the clients with each potential counsellor's information and contacts so that they could seek help elsewhere.
Advertising & Business Skills
After Metamorphose Counselling ran some advertisement campaigns during the summer, I was asked to help in creating a report on the results of the advertising. This was a collaborative effort, and my responsibility was data collection. I collected data from past and present clients, tallying up which websites brought the most clients to us. After the report was completed, we had a meeting to look over the final results. Here, I learned more about the business side of counselling and the process of advertising services to a large audience. I discussed the success of the advertisements with the team and helped raise questions and suggestions for what can be changed for future advertising campaigns.
Technology Skills
As my practicum was entirely online, I needed to forward the information from clients' intake interviews to my supervisor through the internet. However, clients' intake forms are sensitive information that cannot be emailed or saved to a computer normally. To protect clients' privacy, I had to learn the basics of file encryption and remote sharing of files. While I had absolutely no technological experience beforehand, I quickly learned how to use WinManager and VeraCrypt to create intake form files and share them with my supervisor in a way that was safe and secure.
Examples of My Work
Here are some samples of the social media management and newsletter work I completed as part of my internship at Metamorphose Counselling. The first is a promotional Instagram post I wrote and designed, introducing the company's qualifying counsellors. The second is a part of the company's newsletter I wrote on the Iranian protests of 2022, which was sent to all subscribers of the Metamorphose newsletter.
