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- Year Of Graduation: 2022 (Bachelors), 2023 (Masters)
- College/University: University of Michigan
- Major: Clinical-focused social work
What do you do for a living? Can you share what a typical day at work looks like? Do you enjoy what you do?
My current title is behavioral health consultant. I’d say it’s almost like a short-term therapist. I’m also specifically a bilingual one. So, I work in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood—and I am Colombian—so a majority of the population I work with is Hispanic and speaks Spanish.
I work at an outpatient clinic where people go there for their primary care needs. So, when you go to the doctors for your annual checkup or ask for referrals for specialty doctors, or get your flu shots, all those things. I’m not a major hospital and I’m not in-unit treatment or anything like that. I typically have eight slots open for scheduled therapy appointments, and they’re short-term in the sense that I see patients sometimes only one visit, or maybe one follow-up in two weeks, or one follow-up in a month kind of thing. It’s really about when they feel like if I were to step away, I’ve given them the tools to work on whatever we’ve established together on their own.
Besides having eight scheduled slots, part of my role is that I’m kind of uniquely on call. Since people are there to see their doctor, that means that sometimes something comes up. You fill out a PHQ-9, which is a screener for depression, or a GAD-7, which is a screener for anxiety, and the doctor realizes these scores are really high. They’ll have them talk to me or the other person in my role. Or you know, if somebody is crying because they lost somebody, or maybe somebody’s in crisis, whether it was a panic attack or something else. We get asked to see that patient quickly for maybe 20 minutes.
Sometimes we get a high no-show rate because of the fact that we’re at a federally qualified health center which means a lot of Medicare and Medicaid with a predominantly Hispanic population. A lot of people are worried about the new administration, with insurance funding being cut and anti-immigration policies being pushed, so we have a lot of no-shows sometimes. It really varies, but you are mentally locked in for the full eight hours that you’re there.
I enjoy what I do. I think it’s fulfilling when I get really good feedback from patients. I think it feels like important and needed work. The aspect that I don’t like is the very limited flexibility and the fact that despite that we’re healthcare, we have to be productivity-focused. When I originally took the role, I was supposed to only see six people a day. Shortly after I got hired, they switched to eight people, and for every person I see, I write up a note. We bill insurance. I document the process. So that’s extra time on top of that visit. It’s always about the institution and the structures, and I don’t necessarily blame my actual employer or anything. It’s just the fact that we get pushed to see many people and get these billable visits, and there’s not a lot of extra time I have to just not be seeing a patient or know that I’m going to have uninterrupted time. Those are aspects I don’t like.
I feel very fulfilled outside of work with my loved ones and my hobbies, and I don’t necessarily get a lot of flexibility to do something random in the middle of the day or I have to schedule my PTO super far in advance because people want to schedule their doctor’s appointments in advance.
This role seems like it could be pretty mentally taxing. Do you feel this way? How do you handle it?
I often get asked how I handle the fact that it’s a mentally taxing thing. I don’t know if I have a very clear answer. I think I fortunately have had a lot of good mentors. I’ve gone to a school where, especially in my undergrad, even more so than my actual social work degree, I got taught boundaries. So I think it’s easy for me to feel extremely empathetic and present for my patients, but I will fully say that when I leave at 5, I am not thinking about it anymore. I am able to leave it there, and that is something that makes it sustainable.
But I also noticed that my actual physical energy levels are very depleted at the end of the day. In a normal office job, maybe you have a little bit more time to scroll on your phone or send emails and things like that. This is part of the reason I have contemplated switching to a new career. I’ve worked a lot of part-time jobs where I did feel a little bit more autonomy and I kind of missed that. But, yeah, mentally I’m able to establish boundaries which I think is really important and I have a supervisor who I talk about the patients with. I have colleagues who I trust. I have friends who went through the same grad program and work in similar roles. So being able to collaborate with those people kind of lets me release any sort of lingering feelings I might have.
Why did you choose your undergraduate major? Do you feel your time spent in college was valuable? Why or why not?
I went into psychology just because it interests me. I think at some point I did those things in high school where you took a quiz to figure out what your interests were or I think one day my mom showed up in my bedroom with a printed list of different kinds of jobs you could have and was like, “Maybe just scratch one off every day until you end up with top choices.” I did know I wanted to go to the University of Michigan. I knew it was a very high-achieving school. I didn’t go to a high school that was geared towards getting you into a good school. it was very low in terms of admissions into the University of Michigan. So I knew I wanted to go there and it was a bonus that psychology was a pretty decent degree program for them. I think it’s one of the biggest majors they do. People tend to pair it up with something else.
I also went through the very universal experience of losing a loved one. I grew up in a three-generational household and I lost my great aunt when I was 15, and it ended up being one of the most memorable things to ever happen in my life. I think it really shaped my relationship with emotions, my relationship with communication, with supporting other people, and my mental health, and I got exposed to the healthcare system a lot being the daughter of an immigrant.
So I knew that psychology might bring me back to a career that would have to do with maybe grief counseling, or something similar, or would have to do with therapy or would have to work in a hospital. I met social workers for the first time when I went through hospice care for my family, so it was an interest and it also seemed like it was a very diverse degree. I grew a lot as a person and I think I learned so much in my classes, but I think what you really learn through your academics is life skills. I believe that you just expand your mind in a different kind of way by going to college, but I definitely don’t want to diminish people’s choice for those who don’t.
I think maybe a couple of generations before me, people could have just gotten a psych degree and then gone into HR. That’s what people always used to tell me, you know, if all else fails, I could go into HR. But a lot of people specialize in HR now, so I don’t know if a psychology degree really beats out the person who can actually speak to some of the software or programming techniques that an HR person uses or does. So, I don’t know that I could endorse just getting a broad psych degree. If your psych degree at your undergrad is very tailored, whether it be criminal psychology or social psychology, or very clinically focused in your undergrad, so your coursework and background are niche enough that you have enough experience to then follow that career, that’s a different situation. So I think in general, pairing psychology up with other things is great.
Can you tell me about your experience finding a job after graduation? Are you happy with where your journey has led you thus far?
I went straight into my grad program, so I didn’t have to do any job applications at that point in time. I graduated in December of 2023 and I started working as a full-blown professional in the fall of 2024. I kept my part-time jobs and used that to establish routine and income. I used that time to apply for other jobs too.
I will say that one of the benefits of being in healthcare is that we’re extremely employable. It’s not necessarily something that’s going to disappear. Social work gets a really bad reputation in terms of burnout and I understand why. Sometimes it is a lack of boundaries, but sometimes it is bad management. There’s a high turnover. That’s not a good thing, but it means jobs are always available. I kind of knew that if I ever got desperate, I could get a job, but it also meant I could take my time to look for a good role. I also very intentionally took a career break and traveled a lot with friends and my partner, and things like that. That’s why there’s a gap between 2023 and the fall of 2024. However, I would say that my job search was interesting because it wasn’t something my grad program necessarily prepared me heavily for.
I didn’t stay in Michigan and a lot of the career fairs and things were for people who wanted to stay in the state. So I had to go to Indeed and LinkedIn and just pull up Google Maps. I now live and work in Chicago, and so I had to just go to Google Maps and see hospitals and private practices and things like that. I originally was at a private practice for only three months and left because while the clients were great and it was very fulfilling, I was being severely underpaid and the structure of my work was not what I was initially told. It meant that I was able to pivot out of that private practice role into my now outpatient clinic role very quickly because like I said there are always new job openings. It also comes with this understanding that a lot of social work jobs are hit or miss in terms of how you’re going to be treated, how your boundaries are going to be respected, or how heavy your caseload is.
Would you say having prior work experience or internships is important for finding good roles in your industry?
So, some people will get a bachelor’s in social work, which means they can work in a similar capacity to me or an adjacent role but with some legal limitations. I’m a licensed provider and I’m working towards another lensure. Even if I decide to pivot out of the field, I’m getting that license. So you could potentially work a social work job with just the specific bachelor’s degree. That would typically be something called case management. So, you might not be providing therapy, but you might be connecting people with resources and contacting them, and going on with their continuation of care and stuff.
Internships were not too common. I feel like a lot of people in liberal arts or social sciences had part-time jobs and maybe did something in a volunteer capacity. If you wanted to work in a healthcare space, maybe you volunteered in a healthcare capacity, maybe you volunteered for something public health-related or you tried to do research in that kind of domain. One of my part-time jobs was as an office assistant and my other part-time job was as a research assistant and coordinator for a developmental lab in psychology.
I would say if somebody wanted to do what I did, you have to preferably get a master’s degree to do direct therapy. I don’t think you could get an internship practicing therapy without having gone through some of the academic experience, it wouldn’t be very ethical for you to do so. We do a lot of roleplaying in grad school so you could watch a role-play online and see if that feels like a good fit. Speak to other social workers and therapists too. I think the best therapists have been in therapy before and I think a lot of people should be in it. You don’t need to be in crisis to go to therapy.
If I asked you three years ago, what goals would you hope you’ve achieved, in life or career?
If you asked me three years ago, I probably would have said that I would hope I was well-traveled. That was always a goal of mine. It was always leaving the country even just once a year, that was my goal. I also would have wanted to know that I either went to grad school or was multiple years into the same job with the same place in terms of growth, and then I probably wanted to be pretty close to debt-free.
How important is it to have a purpose-driven life? Why or why not?
Purpose is extremely important. I think that as we go through our days it’s important to feel like we’re filling up our buckets. In my world, we talk about a psychosocial spiritual assessment. So I want to know that your mental health is doing okay, that your social life is doing okay, and that your spiritual life, whatever it may be, is doing okay. So I think meaning and purpose are important for work and also the outside life. I would like to feel fulfilled by my work in some capacity, but I don’t see work having to be the only thing that brings me passion and purpose either. Obviously, if we’re going to be spending so much time there, I want to feel like what I’m doing, what I stand for, or the people I’m working for bring me some sort of fulfillment as well.
What’s your biggest struggle right now? What led to it? How are you moving forward?
My biggest struggle right now is that I don’t have a clear focus on what I would like to do. I’m past the ages for internships, and I’ve looked into it. It’s really hard to get one when you’re not a student. So, I’m not in a position where I could dabble in a bunch of things again and try and figure out what role could be a good fit. And technically, even if I did, it would vary from company to company. So my biggest struggle right now is finding out exactly where I want to focus my networking attention in terms of roles and also how long I would like to stay in my current field before either trying to climb the not-super-visible ladder there or fully transitioning out.
What interests/hobbies bring you the most happiness?
Just spending time doing things I love with the people I love. Travel brings me a lot of joy. It’s true what they say: moving your body feels really good. I’ve gotten into taking workout classes and I used to play tennis, and I would love to get back into doing that more frequently. Pickleball too, I actually met my partner playing pickleball. So, doing things like that is fun. I would like to get into playing on a rec volleyball team. I did that a couple of summers ago. I love reading. I love dissecting TV shows and movies I watch. I love embroidery and making art pieces that are hung up on my wall and the clothing that I wear. So, I like discovering and then entertaining my many interests.
What do you want to spend more time working on? What is stopping you?
Definitely networking so that I can learn more about different roles and what it takes to get there. What’s been stopping me is definitely just feeling tired at the end of my day and feeling like I want to rest. But you caught me at a good time this week in particular and a little bit of last week. I’ve kind of realized it’s not all or nothing, right? That in itself is a cognitive distortion. I’ve been trying to sit down for 30 minutes and go through LinkedIn and make a list of some people I want to contact and draft up some messages and things like that. So trying to do it in small bits and pieces.
If we traveled three years into the future of your life, what do you want to achieve? What would you hope has changed?
I hope I feel much better about what I’m doing for work. I hope I’m in a position where wherever I’m at in three years, I don’t necessarily want to move out of that role. I hope that the role, whatever it is, allows me the flexibility to continue to do my outside hobbies. I hope I’m debt-free in three years, too.
What’s the biggest lesson or piece of advice you wish you had known earlier?
It’s really hard to ask for advice or help, but closed mouths don’t get fed. Always lean on the people around you. Ask questions and reach out for help, whether that be for professional reasons or your personal life. “It takes a village” is a phrase that exists for a reason, and it is human nature to need others. Allow yourself to be helped and allow yourself the opportunity to seek help.
Connect With Athena:
- LinkedIn: @AthenaBryer
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