Week 5: Working Independently
Hi everyone, my project took a pause last week for spring break but I’m getting back into my project now. Since my last post, I had my first interview and I went in-person to volunteer at my mentor’s school for the first time. My mentor’s school has an extra week of spring break so this week I’m working on my own and focusing on my literary review and figuring out my student surveys. I’ve talked about the process for my literary review in earlier posts so today I’ll focus on how the interview went and the challenges I’m facing with that part of the project.
My first interview was two weeks ago and it went fantastic. I talked with a former school counselor who’s now a school psychologist so she had lots of great perspectives to answer my questions from. I found that a few of my questions came with repetitive answers so the interview also helped by showing me what I need to adjust for future interviews.
The two main focuses of my project are finding the most effective counseling techniques and researching the importance of allocating funds to school counseling services. The first part of my research is coming up with a lot of the same results, so going forward I’m shifting the focus to research the importance of these resources.
The other problem I’m having is finding professionals to interview that have time to help me with my project. This acts as evidence for my project because it shows how right now counselors are stretched for their time (and we need to put more resources into this) but it also makes my research more difficult. To combat this problem, I’m expanding my interviews to school counselors and psychologists in elementary and middle schools instead of just high schools.
Next week I hope to have more updates about the interviews and the student surveys.