Choosing a Graduate Program:

Part 1 - Personal Motives, Professional Aspirations and Program Factors

It was not all high-quality planning and foresight that got us through our training as counselors. Happenstance, luck, and blundering played significant roles. Even the decision to begin graduate school was less intentional than we might prefer to admit. Like so many important transitions in life, our emergence as professional counselors became a series of often serendipitous events as we were influenced by people often in contradictory ways, selected courses because of scheduling conveniences, and sometimes simply took the path of least resistance.

Our training came before accreditation, before standardized programs, even before comprehensive curricula. Yours doesn't. You cannot count on serendipity. Today we know from our experiences and studies as counseling professionals and counselor educators that much more effective for you as a newcomer is to find answers to the questions that are the focus of this chapter: Will the counseling profession make a good fit with you and your life style? What factors ought to be considered in choosing a graduate program? What type of graduate training is most likely to meet your needs? What will help you get into the program you choose?

YOUR PERSONAL MOTIVES AND PROFESSIONAL ASPIRATIONS

You are considering counseling as a career for a number of reasons, including some that are universal and others that are unique. You are aware of many of these as a part of your personal agenda, but others are hidden from view and may only emerge years in the future. Among the most common reasons given by professionals in the field for entering the profession are the following:

• "I believe we all have a moral obligation to help others less fortunate than ourselves in any way we can. Being a counselor is a way that I can he useful to people."
• "I was helped by a counselor once. I really admired her and the work she was doing. I wanted to be just like her."
• "I was tired of being in the classroom, and I did not want to be a principal."
• "I couldn't get into medical school. This represented another way that I could help people."
• "I'm kind of nosy, I guess. I like learning about other people's lives and having access to a world that is hidden from everyone else."
• "It's an honorable profession. For thousands of years certain elders or healers have been sanctioned by their societies to provide comfort, support, and advice. I like the idea of that kind of role."
• "I have had my own troubles over the years. Learning to be a counselor was one way I tried to keep a lid on my own sense of powerlessness. In a way, I have a better perspective on myself when I see the problems of other people."
• "I enjoy close relationships and working with people. Counseling provides a kind of controlled intimacy. I feel close to my clients, and I like knowing that I have a positive impact on their lives."
• "People have always come to me for help. I thought that I might as well get paid for it. Sometimes I can't believe this is a job since I get so much from it."

Evident in these disclosures is that altruism is tempered with intensely personal motives in choosing counseling as a career. The feelings of power and control, as well as the opportunities to work through one's own issues, are among the most frequently cited reasons. These underlying reasons mean that the counseling professional can be a source of tremendous satisfaction; but they can also become major blocks to professional effectiveness. You can even do great harm to others if you meet your own needs, or act out your own unresolved issues, during sessions. It is for this reason that quality counselor training programs offer components that emphasize personal development as well as skill and knowledge acquisition.

Program Factors to Consider

Accountability movements within the profession, and an increasing consensus among researchers and practitioners regarding appropriate standards of behavior, have led to greater commonality in programs. However, there is still considerable variation among graduate programs as to their faculty, philosophy, and specialty areas. These factors, as well as training levels, accreditation, and location, need to be considered.

Faculty

You may find significant differences between publicly espoused objectives and actual policies as they are implemented daily within programs. One of the best ways these differences among programs may be observed is to look at how well faculty work together as a unit. What is the diversity of instructors in terms of their theoretical orientations, clinical experiences, teaching methods, cultural backgrounds, gender balance, and personality styles? How well do they get along as colleagues?

Some programs have faculty who are cooperative, supportive, and respectful of one another, making it safe for student to find their own paths to learning. Other programs can have faculty who are unduly competitive, threatened, or perturbed. Sometimes students are caught in the middle of these struggles. This is, of course, not a phenomenon unique to academia: all human organizations spark similar political struggles for power and control as individuals and groups try to promote the goals and methods they believe are the best.

The issue is not whether conflict and competition exist in a particular department, which in itself may be quite constructive. Rather, it is a question of the ways faculty disagree with one another. Are they respectful toward each other? What have you heard about the ways instructors support or sabotage one another? Do they avoid embroiling students in their skirmishes? Does there seem to be a general feeling of cooperation and consensus in the department regarding the primary mission of training students?

The answers to these questions can be found by speaking to other students about how well they perceive faculty are getting along, how disagreements are handled, and how conflicts are managed. Expect a reasonable amount of intellectual strife. Professors are, by nature and training, an argumentative lot who enjoy a certain degree of debate and controversy. That is, after all, one way that growth and change take place. By arguing our positions, lobbying for what we believe, standing up for our ideals and standards, we are able to continuously refine and evolve our ideas. This can produce a vigorous program that is on the cutting edge of the profession. The unhappy alternative, however, take place when professionals are rigid and intolerant of those different from themselves. Those are the conditions most likely to lead to petty skirmishes and outright war.

The strength of a faculty is based on much more than how well they get along, however. Other things to look for include racial, gender, and ethnic diversity; time availability; and diversity in functioning.

Racial, gender, and ethnic diversity
Does this seem to be a mix of instructors who exhibit, by their cultural differences, a priority to infuse multicultural awareness and sensitivity into the program? The mandate of our profession is to reach out to those who need our services the most: the disadvantaged and those who are not part of the power base that controls things. One of the ways we help prepare counselors to work with people of diverse cultures, religions, and ethnic and racial backgrounds is to provide models of successful professionals representing diverse cultures.

Time availability
Walk down the hall during several afternoons (graduate classes are often offered in the evenings). Who is available? Are students around who are interested in talking to and working with their instructors? Are faculty around who are interested in talking to their students?

Different expectations are placed on faculty, depending on the norms and mission of their institutions. Some programs find faculty constantly in their offices working on their research projects, advising students, serving on committee assignments. and generally available and interested in talking with students. Other norms exist, however, in which some professors may often not be around because of other professional commitments. Who is available when needed is one barometer that can be used to assess the commitment of faculty to students.

Diversity in functioning
The best way to do counseling and the best way to develop counselors are heatedly debated, but it is generally agreed that it is advisable to be exposed to many theoretical approaches and teaching styles during your tenure as a student. By learning in a variety of settings such as content focused, experientially based, interactive, introspective, supportive, controversial, informal, and highly structured, you can select those features that best fit your personality, career goals, and preferences. This exposure to many different models at so better prepares you for the wide variety of employment, organization, and peer styles that will present themselves after graduation.

Exposure to diversity can also be quite confusing and stressful if faculty attempt to recruit you to their camp while demeaning what others are doing and if you are not helped to reconcile discrepancies and integrate aspects of the many features into your own style. Faculty diversities include those in the following dimensions:

• pedagogical methods: lectures, discussions, work groups, field studies
• evaluation criteria and course requirements: papers, take home exams, objective exams, group presentations
• class atmosphere: formal, relaxed, permissive, structured
• program tracks: rehabilitation, school, mental health, community agency, marriage and family
• specialty areas: appraisal, group work, computer-assisted guidance, early childhood intervention, substance abuse, elderly
• theoretical orientations: existential, behavioral, cognitive, gestalt
• personality: intense, gregarious, demanding, flexible.

Each of these dimensions rarely occurs in pure form in any faculty member because most of us adapt what we do according to the situation. Nevertheless, most counselor educators can articulate a set of beliefs about which they feel most passionate. Likewise, with some systematic observation, you should also be able to identify a consistent style with which each faculty member prefers to operate.

Philosophy

Training programs were once easily identifiable as subscribing to the tenets of a single theoretical base such as psychoanalytic, humanistic, or behavioral. It is now somewhat rare to find allegiance among all staff members to a particular counseling approach; but even when there's, methods of instruction among faculty are likely to be more different than similar. One of the joys of the profession is that each of us is permitted to discover ways of helping others that fit us best, as long as we maintain ethical and competence standards established by our peers.

Nevertheless, in spite of the variations in methods of instruction, approaches to counseling, and even personality styles of faculty, many departments do espouse a particular philosophy of counselor education. This mission statement may be simply the requirement of an accreditation standard, or in many cases, it represents a well-thought-out summary of what the program intends to do and how these goals are to be carried out.

Table 1
POLARITIES IN COUNSELOR TRAINING

Competency based	Experience based
Emphasis on courses	Emphasis on learning experiences
Emphasis on content and skill development	Emphasis on process and skill development on moral and emotional development
Lecture and discussion	Interaction and group experience, and self-reflective activities
Evaluation by exam	Self-evaluation and evaluation by writing papers
Reliance on the technology of systematic instruction	Reliance on the human dimension

You can find out what the philosophy of a program is all about by asking the department chair or members of the faculty and by reading the descriptive literature of the department. Questions for you to consider include How well does the stated mission match with your own goals? What do you know about your learning style?

Consider, for example, two distinctly different programs as outlined in Table 1. Both are legitimate ways of training counselors. In fact, research suggests variables included in each of these programs are Important in learning to be a counselor.

Few programs are as pure as those described in the table, however. The emphasis today is on integration and synthesis. The best features of competency- and experience-based approaches are combined into programs that include (1) content and information acquisition, (2) skill development through systematic modeling and supervision, (3) process interaction in small groups, (4) emotional/personal development through group and self-reflective assignments, (5) evolution of a personal style of practice through supervised experience, and 6) refinement of counseling interventions through feedback on videotapes.

Every program emphasizes some of these ingredients over others. Decide what is most appealing to you, or better yet, what is likely to be most helpful to you in your emergence as a professional counselor. Your learning style, values, experiences, goals, personal needs, and levels of development all affect how well a given model will work for you.

Specialty Areas

One of the keys to securing employment is developing an area of expertise that is both interesting to you and in demand by others. Depending on the needs in your area, there may, for example be a scarcity of elementary school counselors certified rehabilitation counselors substance abuse specialists. student personnel professionals, or marriage and family counselors. There are many other specialties as Well, each of which shares common elements yet also has focused expertise to help specific client populations deal with particular issues.

The function of program specialization is to compensate for the increasingly complex circumstances in which counselors are asked to work. Like professionals in medicine or law, counseling professionals are presented with requests for services that require a high degree of competence or expertise in a particular area whether that is a tropical disease. partnership law. or career decision making. Having specialized training .n a given area increases the likelihood that the counselor insensitive to unique client needs and aware of the most current thinking on dealing with those issues

All counselors receive exposure to the core knowledge base of our profession including developmental theory, career development, assessment, multicultural awareness, and individual and group interventions as well as training in the skills of helping. However, most practitioners also choose to concentrate in a particular professional area that requires specialized training.

This choice of a specialty may be based on a deliberate personal decision. By example. On a love of working with young children or older adults. Such a decision may also be based on expediency such as a surplus of specialized jobs in a given geographic area. Even though you may choose to concentrate in a relatively narrow aspect of helping. However. You will still be able to market yourself in a number of ways. For example, a student who receives her degree in secondary school counseling and satisfies the requirements for licensure in her state is not only qualified to work in schools but also to be employed as an expert in adolescent development in community agencies, substance abuse facilities. or private practice.

Most counseling programs emphasize several distinct specialties rather than one general program. Typically all students take together a core set of courses. These include foundation classes inhuman development, research methods, assessment techniques, counseling theory, multicultural issues, vocational development, and other subjects considered to be part of the necessary training for all practitioners, regardless of specialty. Then, depending on such factors as faculty interests and qualifications, program accreditation, the institution's historical precedents, and the area's political climate, particular specialty areas may be developed. Table 2 provides a sample of those specialties and subspecialties, and their associated employment opportunities.

Table 2
SAMPLE PROGRAM SPECIALTIES AND EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES*

Specialty

• Subspecialty
  • Employment Opportunities

School counseling

• Elementary
  • School counselor
• Secondary
  • Childhood Intervention specialist
  • Career development
  • Youth work in residential facility
  • Parent education
  • Drug prevention

Student personnel

• Academic affairs
  • College administration

College counseling

• Student counseling
  • University counseling center

Rehabilitation

• Substance abuse
  • Private rehabilitation agency
• Vocational rehabilitation
  • Department of social services
  • Hospital

Mental health

• Outpatient
  • Department of mental health
• Inpatient
  • Hospital

Community agency

• Probation
  • Prison
• Corporate consultation
  • Nonprofit agency
• Substance abuse
  • Health education

Marriage and family

• Marriage
  • Private practice
• Sex counseling
  • Reeducation
• Family
  • Community agency
  • Child abuse
  • Divorce mediation

Pastoral

• Ministerial
  • Spiritual and religious
  • Community agency

*Adapted from Kottler, J. A., & Brown, R. W. (1992). Introduction to therapeutic counseling (2nd ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

The specialties are not quite as discrete as they may at first appear. Although it is a good idea to think in terms of one area in which you want to specialize, the different concentrations share a basic set of principles, a common base of knowledge, and a similar collection of skills and interventions. Sometimes the differences between two specialty areas may only be a few courses. In other specialties such as mental health or marriage and family, additional training is required beyond the basic degree. For example, accredited marriage and family counselors in most programs may take the basic 48-semester-hour graduate program and then additional course work in family dynamics, family systems, family interventions, marriage counseling, and sex counseling. A similar model holds true for other specialties such as mental health counseling.

How can you choose the best specialty for you? Several factors should be considered when making a tentative specialty choice:

• what you are qualified for (for example, attaching certificate may be required for school counseling)
• the population you prefer to work with (young children, adolescents, adults, older adults)
• the job opportunities available in your preferred geographic region
• the drive and passion you feel toward a particular kind of professional identity
• the relative strength of the faculty, resources, and support within the various specialties available
• the match between your personal strengths and weaknesses and those of a particular specialty (for example, crisis intervention versus longer term counseling relationships).

One of the best ways to find out what you most enjoy is to talk to as many counselors in the field as possible. Visit as many different settings as you can. This should include those related to your anticipated specialty and also others that may help you to explore additional options.

Training Levels: Master's and Doctorate

The master's degree in counselor educationist now considered the entry-level preparation for qualification as a professional practitioner. Whereas not long ago a bachelor's degree in social work, psychology, or human services was considered sufficient to secure a join the field (and still is in some rural areas), today most professional positions in schools and agencies require a master's degree as a minimal credential. The master's degree is, in fact, the foundation for national certification or state licensure as a counselor.

Master's-level training is essentially counseling practitioner's degree. It qualifies you to work, under supervision in some states and without supervision in others, and to apply the skills of assessment and clinical intervention in various settings (schools, agencies, universities) and with different modalities (individual, group, and family counseling). Most programs require a minimum of 2 years full-time study (48 semester hours), or its equivalent (3 to 5 years part time).

Doctoral training places as much emphasis on research as it does practice. This degree is intended to prepare professionals to function independently as scholars, supervisors, advanced practitioners, and educators. The additional 3 to 5 years spent in school are intended to help the student master the knowledge, research, and skill base of the field. Depending on whether the student's career aspirations are as an administrator, supervisor, researcher, or counselor educator, specialty areas are individually designed. Doctoral-level training is considered terminal degree, which means the graduate (after completing internship and licensure requirements) may function in an independent position as a supervisor of others.

Because of the variety of specific doctoral degrees in the counselor education and counseling psychology fields, choosing to go for a doctorate is not as simple a decision as it sounds. There are different degree areas (such as counselor education, counseling psychology, clinical psychology), specializations (such as mental health, school, business and industry, rehabilitation), and degree designations (such as PhD, EdD, PsyD) that each serve to confuse the issues. However, these differences also serve the purpose of helping you select the program and career path that best matches you. Chapter 8 provides more specific information on these issues, the decisions involved, and the potential outcomes.

Accreditation

The program selection factors described in the preceding section are also the foundation of the program accreditation movement in counseling. Program accreditation is a means of assuring students, potential students, consumers, and clients of students that programs meet professionally accepted minimum standards of training. For example, accreditation standards emphasize maximum student-to-faculty ratios so that students will get a reasonable degree of personalized attention. They also identify critical content and experiential components that must be in place to assure the knowledge base and competencies of graduates.

The Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) is the primary accrediting body designed specifically for counseling programs. Similar recognized bodies are the American Psychological Association (APA) for psychologists, the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) for family counselors. and the Council on Rehabilitation Education (CORE) for rehabilitation counselors. Graduating from an appropriately accredited program assures employers and students that both the university's standards and the reputation of the associated national organization are fully supportive of the quality of the graduates educational experience.

Earning accreditation. and maintaining it, is expensive and time consuming for programs, so institutions take this process very- seriously. Accreditation is regularly publicized in flyers and handouts. It is the knowledgeable and committed applicants who understand enough about the program they are considering to be able to recognize the importance of accreditation in discussions with faculty. on-accredited programs are likely to have given extensive consideration to becoming accredited, but for a number of reasons (for example, unable or unwilling to meet the standards, preference to function independently), they have elected not to follow through with the process. These institutions. as well. Appreciate the prospective student who knows enough about the issues to be able to ask intelligent questions about why accreditation was not pursued.

Location

It is perhaps unfortunate that the single most important reason considered by prospective students in choosing a graduate program is the pragmatic issue of geographical proximity of the institution. We do not wish to demean the practical realities that are involved in attending graduate school. Many counseling students must juggle families, employment. Leisure pursuits and friends with their education. They make significant financial sacrifices and major time commitments. Obviously it is often easier to attend a school that is closer to home, but the program may not fit your needs or style, and you can end up with preparation that does not equip you with the necessary' skills, expertise, and job opportunities that you want. Attending a particular institutions imply because it is nearby should not be the only consideration.

Excerpted from
The Emerging Professional Counselor: Student Dreams to Professional Realities
copyright ©1994,by the American Counseling Association
Authors: Richard J. Hazler and Jeffrey A. Kottler

Copyright © 1998, American Counseling Association

All materials contained herein whether new or re-purposed content are copyrighted.