Feather's Educational Experience

My higher education is in the field clinical psychology, I have a BS in psychology from Lake Erie College in Painesville, OH; an MS in clinical psychology and applied research from Capella University; and I spent over  six years in graduate school, first at a very small now non-existent college in Western New York, and then at Capella University, pursuing a doctorate in clinical psychology. I was in the child psychology concentration at both schools. 

Given that I transferred at the end of my first semester of my third year in what had been a program that did not require a master’s degree, the way that credits transfer from one institution to the other, and the requirements of the program I entered at Capella, I not only had come to the end of my didactic coursework for my doctorate by the time I transferred, I had to enter the master’s program (repeating multiple courses along the way) prior to even beginning the doctoral program at Capella. Although I had been able to transfer in some credits and shave some of that time off, it was not nearly enough. In essence, I not only have completed all didactic coursework required for both of the doctoral programs I was in. I also completed a  good portion of my clinical, or hands-on training. 

Essentially. I had reached the point in my education where the remaining two or so years would have been creating, researching, writing, revising and ultimately defending my dissertation. In and of itself, the most difficult part was over. However, throughout those six years, I also underwent an extensive and much needed period of personal growth that ultimately left me at a place where despite having gone into my graduate training a wide-eyed idealist very much in love with the field, (I literally carried my copy of the DSM-5 around with me like a lovie my first year).  Ultimately I had reached a place where I had learned some significant things both about the field of psychology and academia itself, as well as about who I am now. 

I came to the conclusion that the things that I truly wanted and the things I may have wanted at some point, or equally likely, had believed I wanted simply because that was what I had always been told I did, were not the same. Many of them were actually in opposition to each other. Prior to that point I never questioned nor had the distance to be able to examine this fairly significant concept from a different perspective. All of which led me to the conclusion that there were some inherent flaws to the way that healthcare is practiced and provided in our country. This was to the extent that I felt those problems were very much at odds with both who I had become as a person and what I wanted to do regarding my career. 

I made the decision to quit at the point I knew definitively I had gotten absolutely everything that I was going to from an educational standpoint and everything I honestly wanted out of the program without actually spending more money and time I could ill afford simply to pursue a piece of paper and the authority to be called “doctor”. I realized that the way that child psychotherapy is practiced and managed was very much not at all how I wanted to do what I had been so determined to do: help children. I knew I could still do that, it was just going to be a different way far better suited to my somewhat unusual combination of abilities, education, and personal and professional experience.