 Hi there. My name is Jason Klein. I'm the Director of P20 Initiatives at Northern Illinois University, and part of my job is to work with school districts, community colleges, other post-secondary institutions on supporting students as they think about their college and career pathways and what they're going to do once they're done with high school. Today, as we're all learning at home and doing remote learning, we've realized that those job shadow experiences, those internships that so many schools are trying to offer their students are not possible because we're sheltering in place. So we've started a series, The Career Pathways Virtual Trailheads, where we're bringing those work-based learning experiences to you by interviewing people from a wide variety of occupations. We're super excited today. We know many, many of you are interested in a variety of service and helping professions. Obviously, it's been very hard during the shelter-in-place initial window of these to get a lot of people from healthcare industries because so many people in that field are so tied up. But we've got a therapist here with us today, and Bridget, I'm going to turn it over to you and let you start by introducing yourself to everybody. Yes, thank you. This is fun to be here. My name is Bridget Kerher. I am a licensed clinical social worker and therapist. I also have founded an outpatient therapy practice in Villa Park in Illinois called Green Door Therapy. A friend and I started the practice in August of 2018. We do individual therapy, couple therapy, family therapy, group therapy, and we have a team now that includes five of us all together. Awesome. So tell us about what either a day or a week that's normal looks like for you and your occupation. Yeah, so being that I am like what I say is like an outpatient therapist, that means I'm sort of the traditional what you hear of, you know, you go to a therapist, you scan the couch, you talk to them for an hour. So that's what I do basically. We have an office where we do our sessions. Of course, right now we're doing all tele-therapy sessions, so through video and phone. But the sessions are an hour long. Usually, you know, the cool thing about my job is there's a lot of flexibility. So with that flexibility that's, you know, meaning my day can look a lot different from week to week. I have some days that I'm in the office, some days that I'm not. So, and of course, owning a business, I do a lot of the other things too. I've created our website, I do social media networking, and a lot of other different things too. So my days also just kind of look different all the time in that way, which I think is fun. I really like the variety. So what percent of your time, if you think of your work time as a pie, and we're going to ignore the rest of life and just focus on the pie being the work time, as the business owner, as the co-owner of the business, what percent of your time are you actually spending, working directly with clients, and what percent of your time are you spending on everything else from dealing with insurance companies to the website and social media to whatever other responsibilities you have? Yeah, I would say right now, it's half and half, but that's not necessarily the same, going to be the same. The reason for that is I had a baby a few months ago, so I'm kind of easing my way back into host maternity leave world in terms of session. So this is a great job for parents to have flexibility in what that looks like. But yeah, I would say maybe half and half. So sometimes on an average week now I may do 10 sessions or so, and then sending another certain amount of hours doing the back end or administrative stuff. So if you were talking to a student, a high school or college student who was maybe interested in becoming either a social worker or a psychologist, someone practicing something in the field of therapy where they're clinically practicing and working with patients directly, what would you say are the most important skills to have to be successful in that work? Yeah, and I think the most important skills to have are just open-mindedness. I think social work 101, one of the first things that they really help us, I guess, cultivate this idea of empathy, listening to other people, embracing other people's stories, see resilience in spaces where sometimes people don't see resilience for themselves. There's creativity in that too, but I would say open-mindedness and that interest, I think, in people's stories and in people's lives and being able to sort of walk with them through difficult things, which I know a lot of people have that personality trait anyways, right? And so a job like this I think is a perfect place to find a home. So let's pretend you're talking to that same young person thinking about going in this direction. And for the sake of argument right now, let's say they're a junior in high school. What would be kind of your recommendations in terms of what are the requirements, what are the things they have to do, and then maybe what are some ways you can think of that would be fiscally responsible and good experiences for them to move through their education and their experiences to ultimately be a therapist, maybe a licensed clinical social worker, and be successful at it. Yeah, so I think, so at the stage and level in high school, I tell people this a lot, and I think they get surprised when I say this, but I think if anyone's interested in therapy or mental health as a profession, one of the best ways to get started and learning about it is going to therapy yourself. I've been to therapy myself. Most therapists have been to therapy themselves. It's a great way to just develop your own space for personal development and awareness. And it gives you a good taste of what you'd be getting into. And if you like it or if it makes sense, because I think all therapists need, or at least my opinion is the best of us are working on ourselves too and figuring out how to take best care of our mental health. So that's a piece of it. The other piece I think is to be, so my degree is social work. There's so many things that a social worker can do. They could work in a hospital. They could work in a school. They could work in an adoption agency. I've worked in a lot of different settings. So I would just encourage, I mean, a lot of ways I started out just volunteering. I ran a camp for children with autism in high school. I volunteered at a domestic violence organization. So I think picking some places and organizations that you feel about and seeing if there's a way to volunteer is a great place to sort of start learning about what you could be interested in. Cool. Those are great suggestions, especially some of those kind of specific volunteerism suggestions, because certainly there's a lot of students who already do that, but trying to do that in a way that aligns to maybe a potential career direction. And one of the things that we talk about as educators is it's also okay if students find that through an internship or a volunteer experience that they're like, oh, wait, I don't really like that. I don't want to do that because then they have the experience now going, okay, so maybe this other thing is something that I'm more interested in doing. And they're certainly not spending four years and a lot of money getting a bachelor's degree and then discovering, oh, I don't want to do that then. That's great advice. I really thank you for sharing this. So how do you go to college, you get your degree? How do you get started working in this field? What does that look like? Yeah, so I right away went from my bachelor's to my master's in a lot of helping professions. I actually need your master's to do most things. So I went to my master's program and I had internships in domestic violence in a hospice organization. And then my first job out of grad school was at a call center. So I would say for a lot of people considering mental health, like you said, things to be prepared for is to get a master's degree. My recommendation is to try if you can to do that as quick as possible, because a lot of places won't even let us in the door until we have that master's degree. And then we can move towards what I have like a clinical license as well. So I did my supervision hours at my first job and moved to be able to do like the take a test to have my clinical certification. So tell us more about that. Walk us through that you. So you've gone and you've gotten your bachelor's degree and that took four four and a half or five years for somebody. And then you go on for another couple of years and get a master's degree and you're still not fully like certified. Is that right? Yeah, so the so the cool thing is that I went to St. Louis University and Loyola University, Chicago, and a lot of programs have what's called like advanced standing masters. So because I had a bachelor in social work and went to a master's I completed it in less than two years. It was about like a year and a half, or even I think under closer to a year but so that was cool. So it was a way to sort of straight into it. But yeah, and then in the field I can, you know, you work, you can work in different placements and get your feet wet, but to be able to kind of you're working under someone for a while basically like they're assuming some of that clinical responsibility for you in certain types of jobs. Until then in about two years usually it takes to get the hours of supervision to then be able to for your license exam and take a clinical exam. So it is rigorous and time consuming and important part of important years to sort of grow while being supervised by someone. Until then you can kind of go off more independently on your own and have more options for jobs. Well, I really appreciate you walking through that. And again, for any student watching this, remember this really speaks to the importance of working with your high school college, your high school counselors, your college or university academic advisors to make sure you're having these conversations. And you can find those kind of fast track programs, for example, that you understand what you have to do the next step of the way and are planning for that while being successful in the current step. So I really appreciate you diving into that. And personally in my own experiences as a as a school principal, I've worked with many school psychologist interns and social work interns in their year long internship program. So at some some students watching this may have actually had those experiences too. So tell us about what the most exciting part of your job is. The most exciting part of my job is, I feel like just being able to witness people's lives. As a therapist, you know, get inside scoops in times where I get to know people in such really intimate and beautiful ways really and I feel like it's such a privilege to be able to do that, be able to help walk people through those experiences that they're going through. And only that to be able to have some background knowledge information to share and see them really make their lives better and move towards healthier habits and everything like that. It's just an awesome thing to see it see it happen and be a part of that process. So one thing I like doing on this, we all kind of glamorize jobs as we think about something we want to do and we don't realize that all jobs have things that maybe individual people might not like to do or that lots of people that do that job don't really like to do. For example, many police officers love their jobs, don't love writing reports on a daily basis. So in your job, what is one thing that those of us on the outside might not know that you typically have to do or that people in your profession commonly, well they do it, they just don't like doing it. It's not their favorite part of the job. Sure. I mean the first thing that comes to mind always is taking notes, right. So after every session we're taking notes and documenting what's going on in session. So, and especially in a lot of different settings that can be time consuming. So that's one of the first things. But also, you know, we at our practice we accept a few different insurance companies. We help people use their insurance for therapy, which is something we really value, but that can be time consuming and tricky sometimes to trying to navigate people's insurance benefit. So those are maybe a couple of things, especially in my setting. Those are great examples. So I really only got a couple last questions for you and I feel like the first of them you've kind of already answered it. And in your profession, especially with the last part of your answer, it's kind of a softball just like it would be in my profession as a teacher. But how do you think your job has a positive impact on the world? Yeah, I think everyone has mental health. We're all faced with things in our lives that we deal with. And I think my job has an impact on the world because we're the people that can you can go to during those times during some of your hardest moments. We're here to be able to have said this three times maybe already, but like walk with people through that and I really believe that and I think something we're really passionate about to being the kind of therapists that are really creative and how we approach mental health. I mean, our office, we have a big chalkboard wall up in our office where people will write different prompts. One we had recently was my permission to so people are writing like, I give myself permission to take a break or make a mistake or And it's fun to be able to create a sense of community. And we also have like a bunch of string lights up in our office and we have colorful couches. And I think it's cool to be able to be in this field, which I know touches everyone, but also to be able to make it fun and approachable and not something that necessarily is always so serious and sterile. I think it's also just a cool privilege to be able to take that role in keeping the way and continuing to be a therapist that not just showing up in some of the more traditional ways that you hear. So that's awesome. And then my last question for you and these answers that I've gotten across the episodes have just been outstanding. What are your kind of general words of advice for students today, whether they're 14 or 1618 or 20, what advice would you give them? Yeah, I think one of the biggest things is it's okay to not know what you want to do. I, you know, even with my career, I never thought that I would start my own practice and even if you would have asked me that maybe a couple years ago I would have said, I don't know if I'll ever do that. So I think it's important to just be open to where you are and what paths are possible for you and learn and try to figure it out as you go, have some compassion for yourself and know that you'll just keep trying to follow your gut and make your way. You know, you don't have to have all the answers because you just have to figure it out as you go. Awesome. That's a lot of one of the underlying themes that we keep hearing in these episodes is that trusting your gut and don't be afraid to take risks when it comes to a career. And so I really appreciate you sharing that. Well, Bridget, it's a very busy, very busy time. You have a very important job, always particularly important role right now for people. Well, we are in the shelter in place and so I want to thank you for giving students across Illinois and beyond this time. It's been a real pleasure to get to talk with you. Yeah, thank you. It's been, it's been really fun. I appreciate it. Thanks. For those of you watching, remember we have a whole series of career pathways, virtual trailheads episodes and even on careers you might think you have no interest in. You'd be surprised what you might learn just about the world of work and about achieving those kind of long term goals you have for yourself when it comes to a career. If you have ideas for people we should interview, types of occupations or even questions we should be asking, let us know via Twitter. Our Twitter account is at P20 Network. That's at P20 Network. All one word. And we look forward to hearing from you and bringing more episodes to you moving forward. Bridget, thanks again for being with us. Thank you.