Scratching the Nerd Itch

So, I'm all for professional self-care. There are lots of different ways that people meet professional self-care needs as counselors, and mine is through trainings. I love running trainings, I love a good training as a participant, and everything in between. I also feel like I've finally struck that balance of asking good questions in a training and also not being a total pain in the ass.

It's an important balance to strike.

ANYWAY.

So I recently did a certification training to become a forensic evaluator. I'm pretty stoked about it, and I learned a whole lot. I also decided to go full nerd and do the full asynchronous training that they have on individual assessments. I tried starting it during medical week but that was, quite frankly, a very stupid decision on my part. I absorbed none of it, I couldn't focus on the videos, and also the post-test, I couldn't figure it out.

However, clearer heads prevailed. I sat down this weekend to try again. Because Assessment was one of the main classes I taught when I was teaching, most of it was a huge snooze-fest. Then we got to individual assessments. The training for these was engaging, interesting, and I was pretty stoked about it.

Then I got to the post-test.

Friends, the amount of nerding I did just on the first one was legendary. -LEGENDARY.- They said that no one ever gets a perfect score on the post-tests.

Challenge accepted, trainers. I don't fuck around.

I submitted my first one and we'll see how it goes. But it was asking all kinds of questions where I was like, thinking critically and also just not holding myself back, which I haven't felt since grad school (which I'm certain is one of the 15 main reasons why I loved it so much).

Man, this training is really scratching an itch for me that I didn't think I had anymore. In short, I need to be a nerd. A big one. I'm not sure what that means or what it'll look like, but I've discovered that in the unlikely event that a doctorate is in my future, the number one reason will be because it allows me to be a nerd. I don't care about being in academia, I don't care about teaching. I just want to nerd out. If I could do that for a living, it'd 10000000% be my next career move. Except I want to keep being a therapist. And owning my practice. And all of the things. OK FINE.

Maybe I'll see what needs to happen in order to do more research.