[Ed. note: With this post, I’d like to personally welcome Jeff Liebert, MA, to the Psychotherapy Notes team. Jeff is from Sacramento, currently lives and works in Los Angeles, and is ever-so-close to completing the journey to MFT licensure. His first few posts here will focus on the big decisions that come with the last 100 hours of that journey. Welcome aboard, Jeff! -Ben]
It’s here at last: The final 100 hours. I am so close to completing my supervised experience, which is the most extensive requirement in my way of being a licensed therapist. As I sit here on the edge of licensure, I am full of both excitement and dread.
The excited feelings are pretty self-explanatory: No more logging hours, no more judgments about my status, and no more low-pay internships. I can finally be done with all of those things that have added time, stress, and frustration to the process of becoming a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist.
The feelings of dread are less obvious: No more reduced fees on conferences, trainings, and association memberships; no more mandated supervisor or clinical team to ask for help; and no more intern stress and frustration to motivate me.
I am finally realizing that I am about to start the next stage of my career, the one thing I’m supposed to do for the rest of my life. I’m looking at both a finish line and a starting line. Soon, I will no longer be an intern, which means that I am going to have to do a lot of this on my own.
These last 100 hours don’t signify an end, but rather new challenges I will have to master. In my next post for this series, I’ll address some of the key final-hour decisions we all have to make, like:
- Should I purchase hours tracking software?
- Should I pay for hours validation?
- When should I start studying for my license exams?
- What should I use to help me prepare for my exams?
In future posts, I’ll also address what comes after the exams — hopefully those will be happy posts where I can talk about passing! If so, the next set of decisions comes up:
- Can I celebrate? How?
- What type of work setting should I start in as a new licensee?
- How much should I be paid?
- Should I specialize?
I welcome your thoughts, and your suggestions for additional topics you’d like to see covered in this series. We’re all in this together.
-Jeff Liebert, MA, is a California Marriage and Family Therapist Registered Intern (#83284) working under licensed supervision at Caldwell-Clark in Los Angeles. He focuses on working with professionals in the technology industry. You can learn more about Jeff and his clinical work here.