Head Pshrinker Extraordinaire
This is bouncing off my earlier post about the Ami article. In short girl goes to Ivy league school and then has a hard time getting a job. I know this feeling. I went to a really good school for Psychology and learned under some of the very best that were(and are operating) in their field. I remember applying for a psych related job afterward and saying I learned under Dr. X, and then just in case the potential employer didn’t know who that was, I filled in some of the details Dr. X’s quite impressive resume, including being the chief profiler for the FBI and the CIA(and a few other alphabet soup agencies).
The Potential Employer asked a simple question,
“If I draw a house with a tree next to it, can you tell me all the problems I have ever had in life and what is bothering me now.”
My answer was simply: No. I’m not at that place in my professional development. Considering that I was(and still am) half convinced that Dr. X’s ability to do that was nothing less than black magic that required slaughtering goats and examining entrails, I though I would never be able to get there(still do in fact).
Long story short. I didn’t get the job. While people were impressed with those that I learned under, I was still an unknown quantity. Which taught me a valuable lesson about professional development. It was not so much what you know, but who you know, and more importantly who knows you. Dr. X and I used to do lunch together and I used to train him in self-defense and weight training. So when I got hungry enough, I called Dr. X to ask for him to help me find a job. He asked, “You trained with some interesting Russians right?” I replied, “Yeah, chief instructor of the Moscow MVD(formerly KGB) school and head of what is now the Ukranian GRU.” A few days later, I got some interesting phone calls…
