Students

I have been technically been a “student” of Child Life for 2 years now.

It began with a wonderful practicum at Saint Francis Children’s Hospital in Tulsa, OK and is now continuing with an internship at Monroe Carrel Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville, TN.

Though I don’t claim to know it all by any means, I want to share tips and advice I have learned that may serve helpful to you aspiring Child Life Specialist students!

As always, I welcome the sharing of your own advice and am eager for any questions!

 

If you are applying for internships or even jobs, having a portfolio is a great thing to have on hand. A portfolio should give the staff a snapshot and small collection of your creative and relevant work of child life.

Here are some suggestions when creating your personal portfolio:

1. Keep it professional (i.e. typed tabs), but remember you are wanting to work with kids and show your creativity. So including some color is never a bad thing.

2. Including a rationale at the beginning for why you included the different pieces you did can help communicate your knowledge and understanding of the importance of each collection.

3. Pictures give an even clearer picture of who you are. 😉

TAB IDEAS:

1. Basic info (cover letter, resume, goals, coursework review, child life membership receipt)

2. Play and therapeutic activities

3. Journal excerpts

4. Project samples (I created a CF Prep Book and included that in my portfolio)

5. Related classwork excerpts (case studies, medical terminology charts, etc.)

6. Procedure log and reflections from practicum

Show em what you got!

Whether you are volunteering, in a practicum, or completing an internship, keeping a log of certain experiences you gain can help in a couple ways:

1. Can be concrete proof of interactions you have witnessed. (Great documentation to include in a portfolio…wink, wink.)

2. Helps you remember specific examples and experiences to reflect upon during an interview or for an application essay.

What to include?

Here are some ideas of “log worthy” experiences:

1. Procedures (included date, age/sex of patient, their diagnosis, the procedure, your observations, and the interventions)

2. Activities in the playroom and at bedside (include date, age/sex of patient, activity, results)

3. Charting (include date, age/sex of patient, key points)

4. Time log of your hours (don’t necessarily add this to your portfolio, but this will always be good to have to refer to the hours you worked!)

Keep logging on my friends!

Phone interviews can have the potential to be awkward. For me, it is because I can’t read people’s voices very well and I always manage to interrupt when I am on the phone because I can’t tell if the person is going to talk or not!

When it comes time for internship phone interviews, here are some suggestions that really helped me.

1. Shower and dress in something nice. Sporting your sweat pants can maybe subconsciously make you feel more relaxed than you should be. A little professionalism on the phone never hurts.

2. Make sure your phone is charged! If you have access to a landline, that may be an even better solution.

3. Silence isn’t bad. Once you finish your concise answer to their question backing it up with examples of course 😉 you can give the cue you are finished answering by restating the question they asked (i.e. “So, that is one way I have used play to connect with a child.”) Then, wait on them to ask the next question. Don’t feel like you need to keep talking because they didn’t respond right away. Being sure to take pauses and be comfortable with the silence helps everyone think clearer, and limits the potential of talking all over one another.

4. “Knowledge Wall”. This may not be an effective tool for everyone, but during my phone interview, it greatly helped. I hung several different pieces of paper with answers to questions they could potentially ask me to help my train of thought and conciseness. Some prompts you could use:

About me statement

Your strengths

Your weaknesses

Theorist blurbs (Piaget, Erikson, Parten…)

Why you want to be a part of that hospital

Some activities you have done with each developmental level

I wish you the best of luck interviewing!!

Many internships require you to conduct and create a case study of possibly one or two of your patients throughout the semester.

Here were some key take-aways I learned from completing my first case study.

1. Be sure to connect theory to practice! This is one of the most important elements of a good case study. Answer the question: “Because the patient is at this stage of development, what does this mean?”

2. Make the most of your time. I did my case study while I was working in the Operative Services unit. My initial interacting with my case study patient was all but five minutes. Because he ended up getting admitted, I got in contact with his child life specialist on the unit and she helped me find time to go visit him.

3. Get creative in planning interventions! =)

Attached is my case study for your perusal. It isn’t perfect by any means, but can give you an idea of the outline and opportunities a case study can provide.

Case Study I- Presentation

Managing all the applications for you internships can get pretty crazy! Though I only applied to nine different sites, I have known some people that have applied to 30 hospitals! Whew! With so much information you are gathering from each program, it can get pretty overwhelming to try to keep it all straight.

For my experience, having an organized binder was extremely helpful.

I first had an excel sheet with a row for every hospital I was applying to. Then, I created columns of information I could update about each hospital as I learned more things. Some of those columns you can include would be: the internship coordinators name and contact information, the deadlines, and especially the checklist–what things you need to turn in. Some hospitals may require three letters of recommendation to be submitted on official letterhead while other hospitals require your references to submit a recommendation online. It is important to pay attention to detail in order to keep each requirement straight!

In the binder I also had a tab for each hospital.

Each tab would hold printed off emails of correspondence I had with the internship coordinators, print offs from the website, etc. This was another way to have visual information to help you keep all the hospitals separate from one another.

One other tip- I bought a page protector for baseball cards where I would put business cards from important child life contacts in the front of the binder.

Have a blast staying organized so you can keep up with all those awesome applications you got =)

Having completed my practicum and now my internship, I was left with two enormous binders of resources. Instead of letting the binders collect dust and then maybe one day sifting through them to re-learn information I need, I decided to organize and combine all the articles and handouts into one giant binder. This way, I can easily refer to it when I am faced with a situation when I need a refresher.

Here are the tabs I used:

-Child Life History/Background

-Coping and Distraction

-Language and Communication

-Medical Play

-Medical Terminology

-Therapeutic Activities

-Play

-Family Centered Care/Siblings

-Professional Boundaries and Practice

-Grief and Bereavement

-Preparation

-Documentation

-Assessment

-School Re-Entry (since I did my project on this)

-Student Tips

-Internship Syllabus

-Practicum Syllabus

Though it definitely takes time to combine all your resources, I highly recommend it and think it will come in handy in the future working as a child life specialist one day!