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As a graduate counseling student, the program's final year requires a field internship to apply skills, theory, and techniques in a clinical setting. I just committed to an internship for the duration of the next year of my life, and it surprised me that I ended up picking my alma mater’s high school district.

Throughout the course of my study, I felt the familiar tug of returning to my roots. Yes, still living at home in the town I grew up in may have had something to do with that. With the guidance of a wise professor, I asked myself the question of reciprocity and responsibility. As one who has reaped infinite benefits from my hometown, my schools, and my community, how and when do I give back?

This rhetorical question leads me to my why. I want to enter the mental health profession because I believe that it may be the most dire crisis our country is facing on the personal, communal, and societal levels. The field aims to dissect all three levels and works from all angles to improve the mental health of individuals, groups, and nations. It is daunting to zoom out and look at the big picture in a field internship. But that’s what I love about the counseling profession - there is an opportunity to discern between the micro, meso, and macro, and simultaneously create positive ripple effects across communities and systems.

What does this have to do with me committing to an internship at my alma mater? Well, I think it’s about reconnecting to my why and my purpose. I came across a life-changing quote recently “how you spend your days is how you spend your life.” These seemingly minuscule moments in time ultimately contribute to how we spend our lives. We do spend 40 hours of our time at work per week, so it matters. Period. All this to say that these itty bitty steps, something as tiny as a field placement, are leading us to the next thing on our path. Staying connected to the why is going to help us look at the whole of our lives with satisfaction as we took steps to make the world a better place. Spending our days, to spending our lives. Let’s do it.