Why Grad Students and Early-Career Counselors Keep Getting Left Out
We can all agree the exploitation is real. So why does it still feel like sink or swim?
I've felt like an afterthought for most of my time in this field, and I don't think I'm alone in that.
What being left out actually looks like
On places like Reddit, a student's question in a general therapist thread often gets redirected to a separate student thread that barely anyone sees. If they actually needed insight, they're unlikely to get it, because nobody's looking there.
Bigger conversations follow the same pattern. Fully licensed therapists talk to the general public, and they talk to each other, about things like insurance and what's shifting in the field, but rarely to the graduate students who are about to enter that exact landscape with none of that context. And there's a quieter version of this too: being pre-licensure often reads online as not having anything worthwhile to say yet. Not true. It just might not be what people expect to hear.
The part that actually frustrates me
We can all agree grad students are exploited. We can all agree we're taking on high-acuity clients with very little experience. We can all agree that by graduation, most of us are in serious debt. And yet the fully licensed community, the same people who hold supervisory roles and sit on licensure boards, so often treats all of it as inevitable instead of something they have real power to change.
It doesn't take much. Invite a handful of grad students into the room, even ones who aren't taking insurance yet. Let them get used to being present in these conversations before they're the ones expected to navigate them alone. Sink or swim isn't a system. It's just what happens when nobody decides to build one.
If you’re also feeling a bit fired up, you might enjoy this blog post: Nobody Does the Math Out Loud. Allow Me.
Ashley Rhoden is a former corporate marketing leader turned strategist and website designer who works with therapists and private practice owners ready to stop being invisible online. She's also a grad student in a counseling program — not a therapist, not pre-licensed, just someone who understands this world from both the marketing side and the inside of a counseling program, and brings both to every website she builds.
Work with her to build a website that’s as unique as your sessions are. →
