Career Choices

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Over the past few days I’ve been really thinking about my career choices and have, almost without realising, done some unofficial work experience in two of the fields I’m most interested in. Last week I went into a Primary school for two days with the mother of one of my best friends who worked there (and my friend). I helped out in the nursery classroom and really enjoyed the interaction with the kids, although I confess I didn’t really feel stretched enough in that environment: I didn’t have to think enough, and really relied on instinct, which was fine too and I loved spending time with the children, but I just felt that academically the challenge of teaching Key Stage 1 was not enough for me…. However, obviously I can’t really get a full picture of the job in a couple of days so I won’t rule that path out completely as I definitely enjoyed it and my passion for working with children was reconfirmed…

On Wednesday, I went into work with my Mum, who works for St Helens Council as a director of children’s services, and spent some time exploring the child/educational psychology route. I talked to the head educational psychologist (or EP as they call themsetlves for short) and he explained more to me about what they do in detail, and what their role is in a community etc. He was really nice and didn’t patronise me at all – he spoke to me as an adult, and asked me things like whether I thought it was right to search for labels for children with difficulties, such as Autism, ADHD etc when they are not necessarily correct , helpful and/or obvious (often children display traits of several different disorders and contradict their own diagnoses etc.) which I found really interesting to talk about on an intellectual level.

I then went out with one of the other EPs to test a child with suspected ASD and ADHD. That was really interesting because I got to interact with the child on a one-to-one basis, and loved the mental challenge of logging his behaviour in my head and tracking it through to look for a pattern. The particular child I met seemed to, as I explained before, have many different traits of different disorders, so looking for a certain predominant one as he played and talked to me made me feel almost like a detective and was a very interesting concept. When we got back to the office, the EP I had shadowed (a very nice woman) showed me how to score up the WISC test the child had done and plot the results on a graph to, again, look for any pattern. She then began to write up the report for the visit which was a lot less boring than I might have imagined - it just basically described what had happened with the child from the notes we'd taken, and it was a bit like an essay so I was happy :)

Have not come to a proper conclusion still about my future job, especially as I have not yet really explored my other main area of interest - paediatrics..... Will keep thinking...