Goings-on

I finally got a diagnosis for my physical ailment which is what I thought it might be, so I'm glad it's figured out. Kinda sucks that my doctor didn't think to do this most recent test until after I wasted lots of money on another more expensive test that I didn't need. And I'm having to jump through hoops to get the medicine for what I now know I have. It's so expensive that there's a manufacturer hotline for it which offers the chance of getting financial assistance. I'm hoping that works out, but I won't know for a bit.

My sport psychology class is underway, and it seems really interesting. Even if it's not my career goal, I still love it the way I love fiction (which also isn't my career). Speaking of fiction, which I don't normally write about, I've managed to keep reading without too much of a break despite the busy grad school load I had! I've always feared being too busy (and I hope I don't jinx myself now) but since the start of last semester I finished Beautiful Creatures, Shatter Me (the last book of the series because I'd read the other two previously), Divergent, and now I'm halfway through the Maze Runner series. Since so many books are being made into movies now, that's sort of how I'm determining what I read next.

For my internship, I've had two more meetings since my first. It's not like a traditional job where I go into an office everyday or have set hours or anything. She works out of her home, so when we meet, it's for a few hours once a week (that's what it's been so far), and my classmate who interned with her during the spring has come the last two times and we've all been working together. It's fun. And she usually makes sure we have stuff to work on throughout the week at our own home. One project is a book she's writing on marijuana, which she plans to publish soon so people in Florida can be better informed when it comes time to vote on legalizing it for medical use in November. I'm contributing to it by researching and providing info on marijuana cessation (with the idea being that if it gets legalized, more people will probably use it and there might be a need to help people quit if it turns into addiction). At this point, people who want to quit are referred to drug abuse programs because it is a drug. People haven't really thought about it as being similar to smoking cigarettes, but it is similar to that as well. There are many smoking cessation programs, but none specifically geared toward marijuana. I talked to someone in Colorado about whether there might be something like that in the works, but she said there isn't anything. She said they have a hard enough time getting people to quit tobacco and no one seems to want to quit marijuana either. I'm not particularly focused on drug issues, but it does relate to the health and wellness field. When I mentioned that I had an interest in program development, C (as I'll refer to her now to make it easier) said she could tie it into this project.

The other stuff I've been working on has been related to my finding an actual job in the field. She helped me revise my resume and I've started checking boards regularly now. I'm checking the Dept. of Health, some industry boards my professor gave me (phfr.com, hfit, hpcareer.net, bluefishjobs to name a few), careerbuilder (under the search term 'wellness coach' as opposed to browsing job categories which are too broad on that site), and craigslist as a back-up. Additionally, I went through all the brochures I collected at the Wellness Expo back in December and found one for a company in St. Pete that does exactly what I want to do – their employees do wellness coaching and give presentations and workshops on a variety of topics to a variety of clients. I don't really know if I'm qualified for it yet, but C is telling me to try anyway because some places might provide training. Speaking of which, she's letting me go through the binder for the WellCoaches program that she did so I can get some self-study out of it before signing up to do the actual program (which I said I wanted to do in my last post). I still want to do the program, I'm just not sure when yet. And speaking of the Wellness Council (which sponsered the Expo I went to), I'm now on their email list so I just got notified of a mini-conference they're having next month on behavior change. So I've got that marked on my calendar. And also a meeting in July for the Partners in Obesity Prevention group that I just found out about from my classmate.

I'm not sure if I should hold out for a job in my field at this point or not. I've come across a few things where I thought “well, I could be doing this in the meantime” or “if nothing happens for a while and I really need something I could apply.” But I like being able to devote more time to my class and internship and searching for jobs in my field and going to networking things and all. Or maybe I just initially felt too busy to go applying for things that, at the time, seemed do-able but weren't long-term prospects. I don't know, we'll see.