Danielle Caldwell has a simple response when asked what she finds most rewarding about school counseling. She delivers it emphatically and without hesitation.
“The students,” says Caldwell, an MA degree candidate in the LMU School of Education Counseling Program. “When they come back to you and say, ‘I got into this school,’ or ‘Thank you so much for helping me with this,’ it just makes it all worth it.”
Caldwell is currently completing the SOE program’s fieldwork requirement in the Culver City Unified School District. She spent the fall semester at Culver City Middle School, providing academic as well as social and emotional counseling to students. During her time there, Caldwell created and co-facilitated a life-skills group to help incoming sixth-graders adjust to their transition to middle school. She also assisted the middle-school counselors with the coordination and implementation of their Signs of Suicide curriculum classroom presentations, the seventh-grade retreats, and the Career Day event. Caldwell has spent the spring semester at Culver City High School offering college and career counseling to juniors and seniors, assisting seniors in completing their community college and FAFSA applications, and coordinating student job-shadow opportunities. She has also assisted the career counselor in developing and coordinating the school’s first annual Spring Career Fair.
“It’s been exciting to be able to apply the counseling techniques I’ve learned at LMU in my one-on-one meetings with students,” Caldwell says. “The program has provided me with foundational information about theories and evidence-based practices, and I’ve been able to put them to use in Culver City.”
A graduate of Culver City public schools herself, Caldwell became interested in school counseling while pursuing her bachelor’s degree in psychology at California State University, Long Beach. For her undergraduate fieldwork experience at Culver Park High School, a continuation school within the Culver City Unified School District, she helped to develop The Monday After, a program that provides students with college- and job-related resources and guidance to assist them in meeting their goals after graduation. The experience was so gratifying that Caldwell continued to volunteer at Culver Park for three years after her fieldwork requirement had been met, and went on to be named the school’s Volunteer of the Year. “After that experience I knew what I wanted — to be in schools, helping students figure out what they wanted to do with their lives,” Caldwell says. “So I applied for the LMU School Counseling Program.”
Caldwell says her time at SOE has both validated her decision and opened her mind to other aspects of the field, including academic and social/emotional counseling. She is in the counseling program’s LPCC (licensed professional clinical counselor) track, and has enrolled in SOE’s new Child Welfare and Attendance Supplemental Authorization program, which prepares school counseling and school psychology program candidates to work directly with students to improve average daily attendance.
“I’ve learned so much from my professors,” Caldwell says. “This program goes well beyond the traditional PowerPoint-oriented lectures to foster a deeper learning based on the real-world experience that faculty bring. I’ve been very happy with my decision to enroll at LMU.”
