Early Career Professionals Committee – Summer 2015Welcome to summer for all of the ECPs that are fortunate enough to have a 9-month schedule! For those of you that are still working in your 12-month positions, we hope you still get some time for self-care and vacations this summer! The summer is ideally a time for rejuvenation, and to catch up on those writing and/or project goals that kept getting pushed to the backburner as student, client, and committee needs took over your schedule during the academic year. The APA ECP website (http://apa.org/careers/early-career/) linked to a nice brief article titled Towards Structuring a Productive Summer: Tips for the Early Career Professional. It’s important to set goals and figure out strategies that help you stay accountable or else before you know it, you’re at APA in August and the school year is starting right back up! One of the resources that they recommend in that article is Silvia’s book How to Write A lot. I’ve also found this book to be useful for helping to increase writing productivity throughout the year. An idea put forth in the book is to form writing accountability groups. As you know, it can be challenging to find time to coordinate meetings, and what if your writing buddies are spread out around the country? I’ve recently started a virtual writing group via Facebook with some of my friends and colleagues from around the world. So far, it’s low key, we all set goals on the same day each week and then check back in and post our progress. We’ve also been posting occasional questions and resources. I’m finding that having this weekly check-in is useful in terms of my accountability and it’s also inspiring to hear about the work each of my colleagues are doing on a weekly basis. This is a step I’m taking to try to not let a summer pass by without making progress towards those goals! If you have ideas for other strategies or resources that you think would be beneficial for ECPs to hear about, we encourage you to attend the ECP Resource Development Working Group session in the hospitality suite at APA this year. We are going to continue a project we’ve begun on this committee to develop a resource toolkit for ECPs and we’d love to hear from as many ECPs as possible. Speaking of APA, we are pleased to announce the winners of our ECP Travel Grants are Hanako Suzuki and Kimberly Langrehr, congratulations to the winners and we encourage all ECPs to apply for these travel grants next year. Our committee has been pulling together several sessions for ECPs at APA. We will post complete details of all of the programming on the website and Facebook as convention draws closer, but be sure to mark your calendars for the following events:
Also, be sure to stop by the SCP hospitality suite and grab a “Div 17 ECP” flag for your name badge so we’ll be able to spot each other in the crowds and increase our networking opportunities. We hope many of you have submitted your applications to join the committee; we’re currently reviewing those applications. And as always, if you have any ideas for issues you’d like to see addressed by the committee, be sure to reach out to our chair, Nadia Hasan ([email protected]) or our chair-elect, Valene Whittaker ([email protected]). Looking forward to seeing everyone in Toronto. Tiffany O’Shaughnessy, PhD Committee Member and Newsletter Coordinator Sonoma State University Tags: APA Convention, Early Career Professionals |