Hello all! I hope your week has been going well! As of this Friday, I have one month left of my internship!! During these last few months of my internship I have taken on more and more responsibility during music therapy sessions. Along with this greater responsibility, I have also gotten to experience things that I have never gotten to experience before. During my blog post this week, I will be discussing some of these new experiences!
Leading Sessions Alone
Last week, one of my supervisors had an emergency situation. Due to this, my supervisor was unable to accompany and supervise me while leading my sessions. I had been leading sessions solo for about a month at this point, but I had my supervisor there to supervise me and give advice before and after sessions. Now, I unexpectedly had to go on my own to the contract sites and see clients alone at MTC. This was very nerve racking for me, but it required me to trust in myself and my abilities as a music therapist intern. I was unexpectedly put into this new situation, but I was proud of myself for taking on the challenge and responsibility.
Trying a New Instrument
I had been brainstorming new interventions to use with my clients at MTC. Particularly, I wanted to find a new intervention to target fine motor skills with one of my clients. I thought about using an autoharp to target this goal. However, this idea quickly had to change when I discovered MTC does not have an autoharp. One of my supervisors shared with me that there was a Q-Chord at MTC. A Q-Chord is an electronic instrument that plays a chord when pressing a button. I was familiar with the Q-Chord, but I had never played one before. I worked to become acquainted with how to use and play a Q-Chord over the week. At the end of the week, I implemented the Q-Chord into the session with the client. The client took to using the Q-Chord quickly and I look forward to using it in upcoming sessions with this client.
Co-treating for the First Time!
One of the most exciting new experiences I had this last week was that I had the opportunity to co-treat with a physical therapist at St. John’s Children’s hospital! As I have written about in the past, I love interdisciplinary work! One of my upcoming assignments is to co-treat with a related professional. One of the patients I have been seeing regularly at the hospital has also been receiving regular physical therapy services. Because of this, my supervisor and I reached out to the physical therapy services at the St. John’s about possible opportunities to co-treat.
I was thrilled to receive a call from one of the physical therapists about two opportunities to co-treat! I was very excited for this opportunity to co-treat, but I was very nervous because this was something I have never done before. Going into the sessions, I found it difficult to find where to insert myself into the session. However, I tried not to overthink this and worked to find places where I could support the work the physical therapist was doing. In the end, I was thrilled with how the sessions went and the physical therapist also stated excitement about the sessions and co-treating with music therapy in the future.
Overall, these new experiences were scary and challenging at times, but I feel I have grown so much from them! I look forward to seeing what other new experiences I get during the last month of my internship and throughout my career as a music therapist.
Lillian
