Day 6: Self Discovery in Diabetes

Journal Entry#7 Monday 11/13/2012
Having completed the first week and the first day of your internship, what are you goals for the last four days? 

For the last 4 days, I'd like to create some final questions and create a doc board outside of my internship office hours. I really need to hunker down and decide with my expert what my final product is going to be. I'm not entirely sure what it even could be at this point.

I would like to keep up with my hours at the hospital and logging outside of there at home in notes, and worksheets and this electronic journal, and the class at Yale.

Lastly, I'd like to start talking about how much different this experience is from what I thought it was going to be. It's a whole new world, really.
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Today wasn't much different than the others. I'm really getting into the routine now. I went to Managed Care, where phone consultations are held and today was a 'Peer Mentoring' Diabetes brainstorming session. The key themes of the session were really Self Motivation, Self Reliance, and Autonomy. There was so much I wanted to say, and since RMSEL really stresses Socratic Questioning and Socratic Seminar, I wanted to ask questions to guide the participants in the 'right' direction, but I was thinking about it all wrong. We, as facilitators were only there to take in the information and store it and condense it for them. We were not 'looking' for specific answers. We needed answers from people who live and deal with diabetes every day of their lives. They make the coping mechanisms for themselves. They create the structures. I learned a lot about what it must be like to be a teacher, especially in a place like RMSEL, or even how it is to be a parent; you can't take the conversation in the direction you want, because it's not your right to take it in that direction; I needed to go with the wind and trust the participants. This gave greater insight to my own life. I appreciated that I recognized this because this internship isn't solely about learning about how being a psychologist is, it's about self discovery; learning about what I want to do, about myself, about the world around me and how it works.

I truly value this opportunity.

We later had a staff meeting which was about 90 min and that was really boring.

That's all for today.