The jubilant end of a long hard week
I was wandering, not aimlessly, per se though I'm sure to the observers it appeared that way, around and around a two-block radius in Harlem, trying to find a bus stop for the M35, that elusive transport to the badlands of Ward Island, when I heard someone calling my name. I'm a lot like a horse with blinders on when I'm out on the street, because the teaming masses of people in Manhattan are a little too much for me to bare most days, so to have someone calling out to me was pretty jarring. When my eyes focused back to the people around me, I realized I was standing face to face with Heather Glubo, one of my coworkers from NYU whom I hadn't seen or heard from in years. Like me, she was dressed in a fine suit scouring the blocks for the bus stop. We exchanged astonished hellos and quickly established that we were going to be attending the same group interview at Manhattan Psychiatric Center for a shot at a highly-coveted externship position. And we were both equally desperate after being forced by our training directors to give up positions we had been offered and re-enter the applicant pool at the bitter end of acceptance time. We found the stop together, but the bus whipped passed us, and the next one wasn't scheduled for 15 minutes, so we jumped in a livery cab.
Wards Island sits between Manhattan and Queens, but it might as well be in another country. The only buildings breaking up its vast lawns and twisting pathway of a road are the water treatment plant and the Psychiatric Center. The Triborough bridge arcs over it on one end, ferrying oblivious commuters from borough to borough, while the hospital's clientele struggle with reality inside its imposing walls down below. This place is hardcore. And hardcore in the field of psychology, well, that's pretty damn hard.
We waited in the foyer with the two other interviewees, who at first thought we were already working there. I guess that was a good sign. It's far more comforting walking into a new place with someone you know, especially when that place requires you to be buzzed into and then out of an airlock to separate the outside world from the in. We were taken to a conference room and sat around a table with 2 supervisors, and took turns as best we could selling ourselves as knowledgeable would-be psychologists, though as a group we had relatively little experience. One of the girls was hyper-competitive, probably a product of her only having been a first-year student (the rest of us had a full year on her, and more hands-on experience) and doubtlessly having an even harder time than Heather or I convincing interviewers of her competence. When they asked her about her testing experience, she immediately stated that she would be attending a Rorschach conference in California that would be equivalent to taking a class in it, and that she was sure she would be fully prepared to give it to patients by September. There's no way in HELL you'd be ready to give that test to someone with severe psychopathology without giving it to less severe clients at least 3 or 4 times. Its just not that easy. Anyway, Heather, on the other hand, did really well, and I've always found her to be incredibly likable. I felt my own competitive streak enlivened as I sat beside her, but did my best to reign it in and not sound as desperate as I felt.
The program sounded like a lot of hard work, and just the kind of experience I need to become a better clinician. I'd have two individual clients to see every week, multiple group therapy sessions to co-lead with another psych team member, and plenty of supervision. Testing is ample, report writing is highly valued, and there are didactic seminars every week as well as training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Sign me up, right?
We were taken on a tour of the place that lasted FOR EVER. The hospital seems bigger on the inside than on the outside, and each ward has a mirror ward connected to it, like an endless serious of antechambers in a labrynth. The patients have a semi-structured day where they can hang out in the TV room in the morning and evening, have meals at regular times, and spend most of the middle part of the day in treatment. The groups are all held at the same time at "The Mall," a giant ward with lots of windows. When we walked in, we saw one group where a man was running circles around his fellow attendees, and no one seemed to notice. It wasn't mass hysteria, by any means, but it was clear that every person there was somehow off, set apart from the rest of the world.
After the tour, which only I and the hyper-contender made it through, we walked out of the building and were immediately approached by a quick-talking guy with a cell phone in his outstretched hand. "Check out my girl!" he said, shoving her photo on his phone screen in my face. "No time, I'm on my way out," I said. Unfortunately, he was on his way out too, to the bus stop I'd soon be heading towards. I looked sheepishly at hyper-contender girl and asked if she knew where the bus stop was, to which she replied "No, I drove," and hurried off to the parking lot, leaving me standing there in the rain (I guess it was out of the question to give me a lift over the bridge with her and drop me on a street corner anywhere in civilization). I stood there a moment, getting colder, trying to figure out if I should wait till the first bus came and left so I wouldn't have to talk to the photo guy, or just suck it up. It was windy, and wet, and I couldn't bear the thought of spending more time standing around in high-heeled shoes in the gravel than I absolutely had to, so I started trekking towards the stop. Photo guy saw me immediately, and yelled, "See, you said you didn't have time for me, but now you're heading to the bus too!" He didn't sound all that upset, so I yelled back, "I guess you should show me your photos then."
The bus stop is directly in front of the guardhouse at the hospital's entrance, though several yards away on the other side of the street. There's a rain shelter there where several men were huddled, some with lots of garbage bags full of unseen things, and they might as well have been holding signs that said "Come near at your own risk." I wasn't about to step inside the enclosure, being the sole woman there, and fairly small compared to them. Photo guy was talking my ear off and trying to get me to come in out of the rain. I listened as best I could and asked questions about his girl when appropriate, and found that the more I asked, the less interested he was in telling me. The other men had begun to inch closer to me and I seriously considered running then to the guardhouse. Then the bus pulled up and the whole situation returned to normalcy. Photo guy wandered off without another word to me, and I took the bus seat closest to the driver at the front. I was soon back in Harlem and on my way to another hospital to drop off another application.
When I got home, I had word on my voicemail from a third place I had applied that all the positions had been filled, after hearing encouraging things from the director there only an hour before. I started getting hopeless and cried when Jonathan came home.
I spent the next day calling more hospitals to beg for openings, and dreamed restlessly all night about the myriad tasks I'd have to complete today- the phone calls and emails and trips to the post office, the turtles, the participants, and the clients at the clinic I'd be seeing, the updates on the computer systems, the analyzing of data, and the trip to the drugstore for toilet paper- to keep my life, research, and brain in order. By noon I was thoroughly zombified, and just sort of gave up on the whole thing. That's when the phone call came. The supervisor from Manhattan Psychiatric Center had a different sound to her voice than everyone else that had called me in the past 3 weeks, so my heart immediately soared, and I knew before she'd even asked me that I'd be taking the position. My worries, well most of them anyway, were absolved. I actually screamed out of pure joy.
This is not going to be easy, by any means. The job itself will be high-stress and little reward. They will work me to the bone (if brains can be said to have bones; maybe " work me to the Corpus Callosum" is a more appropriate phrase). And I'll have to find a way to feel (and be) safe on the bus trip there and back. I briefly considered getting a car, but traffic on the Triborough bridge in the morning would probably nullify any time benefits, and I certainly don't have the money for it anyway.
So yeah, it all worked out in the end, just like everyone said it would. And thank god. This Saturday should be the last one I have to go to work to make up a day, now that I'm done running off to interviews at the last minute. The trial by fire begins in September.
Wards Island sits between Manhattan and Queens, but it might as well be in another country. The only buildings breaking up its vast lawns and twisting pathway of a road are the water treatment plant and the Psychiatric Center. The Triborough bridge arcs over it on one end, ferrying oblivious commuters from borough to borough, while the hospital's clientele struggle with reality inside its imposing walls down below. This place is hardcore. And hardcore in the field of psychology, well, that's pretty damn hard.
We waited in the foyer with the two other interviewees, who at first thought we were already working there. I guess that was a good sign. It's far more comforting walking into a new place with someone you know, especially when that place requires you to be buzzed into and then out of an airlock to separate the outside world from the in. We were taken to a conference room and sat around a table with 2 supervisors, and took turns as best we could selling ourselves as knowledgeable would-be psychologists, though as a group we had relatively little experience. One of the girls was hyper-competitive, probably a product of her only having been a first-year student (the rest of us had a full year on her, and more hands-on experience) and doubtlessly having an even harder time than Heather or I convincing interviewers of her competence. When they asked her about her testing experience, she immediately stated that she would be attending a Rorschach conference in California that would be equivalent to taking a class in it, and that she was sure she would be fully prepared to give it to patients by September. There's no way in HELL you'd be ready to give that test to someone with severe psychopathology without giving it to less severe clients at least 3 or 4 times. Its just not that easy. Anyway, Heather, on the other hand, did really well, and I've always found her to be incredibly likable. I felt my own competitive streak enlivened as I sat beside her, but did my best to reign it in and not sound as desperate as I felt.
The program sounded like a lot of hard work, and just the kind of experience I need to become a better clinician. I'd have two individual clients to see every week, multiple group therapy sessions to co-lead with another psych team member, and plenty of supervision. Testing is ample, report writing is highly valued, and there are didactic seminars every week as well as training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Sign me up, right?
We were taken on a tour of the place that lasted FOR EVER. The hospital seems bigger on the inside than on the outside, and each ward has a mirror ward connected to it, like an endless serious of antechambers in a labrynth. The patients have a semi-structured day where they can hang out in the TV room in the morning and evening, have meals at regular times, and spend most of the middle part of the day in treatment. The groups are all held at the same time at "The Mall," a giant ward with lots of windows. When we walked in, we saw one group where a man was running circles around his fellow attendees, and no one seemed to notice. It wasn't mass hysteria, by any means, but it was clear that every person there was somehow off, set apart from the rest of the world.
After the tour, which only I and the hyper-contender made it through, we walked out of the building and were immediately approached by a quick-talking guy with a cell phone in his outstretched hand. "Check out my girl!" he said, shoving her photo on his phone screen in my face. "No time, I'm on my way out," I said. Unfortunately, he was on his way out too, to the bus stop I'd soon be heading towards. I looked sheepishly at hyper-contender girl and asked if she knew where the bus stop was, to which she replied "No, I drove," and hurried off to the parking lot, leaving me standing there in the rain (I guess it was out of the question to give me a lift over the bridge with her and drop me on a street corner anywhere in civilization). I stood there a moment, getting colder, trying to figure out if I should wait till the first bus came and left so I wouldn't have to talk to the photo guy, or just suck it up. It was windy, and wet, and I couldn't bear the thought of spending more time standing around in high-heeled shoes in the gravel than I absolutely had to, so I started trekking towards the stop. Photo guy saw me immediately, and yelled, "See, you said you didn't have time for me, but now you're heading to the bus too!" He didn't sound all that upset, so I yelled back, "I guess you should show me your photos then."
The bus stop is directly in front of the guardhouse at the hospital's entrance, though several yards away on the other side of the street. There's a rain shelter there where several men were huddled, some with lots of garbage bags full of unseen things, and they might as well have been holding signs that said "Come near at your own risk." I wasn't about to step inside the enclosure, being the sole woman there, and fairly small compared to them. Photo guy was talking my ear off and trying to get me to come in out of the rain. I listened as best I could and asked questions about his girl when appropriate, and found that the more I asked, the less interested he was in telling me. The other men had begun to inch closer to me and I seriously considered running then to the guardhouse. Then the bus pulled up and the whole situation returned to normalcy. Photo guy wandered off without another word to me, and I took the bus seat closest to the driver at the front. I was soon back in Harlem and on my way to another hospital to drop off another application.
When I got home, I had word on my voicemail from a third place I had applied that all the positions had been filled, after hearing encouraging things from the director there only an hour before. I started getting hopeless and cried when Jonathan came home.
I spent the next day calling more hospitals to beg for openings, and dreamed restlessly all night about the myriad tasks I'd have to complete today- the phone calls and emails and trips to the post office, the turtles, the participants, and the clients at the clinic I'd be seeing, the updates on the computer systems, the analyzing of data, and the trip to the drugstore for toilet paper- to keep my life, research, and brain in order. By noon I was thoroughly zombified, and just sort of gave up on the whole thing. That's when the phone call came. The supervisor from Manhattan Psychiatric Center had a different sound to her voice than everyone else that had called me in the past 3 weeks, so my heart immediately soared, and I knew before she'd even asked me that I'd be taking the position. My worries, well most of them anyway, were absolved. I actually screamed out of pure joy.
This is not going to be easy, by any means. The job itself will be high-stress and little reward. They will work me to the bone (if brains can be said to have bones; maybe " work me to the Corpus Callosum" is a more appropriate phrase). And I'll have to find a way to feel (and be) safe on the bus trip there and back. I briefly considered getting a car, but traffic on the Triborough bridge in the morning would probably nullify any time benefits, and I certainly don't have the money for it anyway.
So yeah, it all worked out in the end, just like everyone said it would. And thank god. This Saturday should be the last one I have to go to work to make up a day, now that I'm done running off to interviews at the last minute. The trial by fire begins in September.