Want the Infographic?

I’ll email it to you, just click the image.

I’m Joe Sanok from Practice of the Practice, and I know when I was in grad school, it was just tough to be in grad school. It was a time of writing papers, a time of just trying to keep up. Sometimes, you know, I had to work and that sometimes I had to work quite a bit outside of grad school to make money to survive and like a private practice was so far from my mind.But here are some very clear tips of things that you can be doing in grad school to help you launch a private practice when you get out. There are some very clear things you can do, semester by semester, exactly what you can do so that you can launch much stronger than your fellow students. Have an awesome day. I look forward to talking to you soon. Bye.

Here in grad school, you’re writing all these papers. You got the headers, you got the titles, you got all the content, your thesis statement. A lot of times you’re writing papers about things that you don’t really care that much about. Maybe you have some interest in, but you probably wouldn’t just sit down and write a 20-page paper about this information.

For you, it’s sort of a waste of time in regards to your career. It’s showing you can write, it’s showing you can think, it’s showing you can look into research. But what if there’s a better way? What if you could take that information in your very first semester in grad school and start to launch your private practice?

There actually is. Here’s the plan.

What to do in graduate school to start your career

So take that information. Take topics that interest you. So maybe depression, anxiety and think from the mindset of:

• “If this were a blog post, what would I write about it?” So take that information, take the research and start a blog.
• Now you’re not going to have your counseling practice name, but after you launch your blog and your website and you become a trained licensed professional, you can then use this information and do a permanent redirect with your websites.
• You’re going to have all of that SEO, the search engine optimization. You’re going to retain your audience, and you’ll have demonstrated your expertise over two to three years of grad school.

I mean, imagine if you’d be three years fast-forward just from one semester of work. So what should you do in your second semester?

Second Semester Counseling Program

So your second semester, you’re going to focus in on doing all sorts of social media. So you’re going to be doing Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, really learn these platforms. The main purpose isn’t to get a massive following, although that wouldn’t be bad. What you want to do is you really want to just start to grow an audience and learn the platforms so that when it’s time to launch, you really can grow that audience. As well, it’s a great way to promote the blog post that you’re already writing and continue to grow that audience.

Third semester Counseling Coffee

Third semester, what are you going to do? Go get some cups of coffee with local clinicians. Get to know people, get to talk to people, help them learn who you are and learn what the field is like out there. Make those connections, have conversations, drink delicious coffee, but the big thing that you really want to remember is your main purpose is to learn – it’s to learn about what the practice is like. It’s to learn what it’s like to be a clinician in your area, to make those social connections and to listen, listen, listen, listen. In sales and business, oftentimes, they say there’s a reason you have two ears and one mouth. You’re supposed to be listening twice as much.

I would actually say ask about your questions and really investigate that person so that you’re taking in, you’re absorbing information and then it’s leading to more ideas. Those ideas are going to lead to blog posts, potential ways that you can fill in gaps in your community, you could do services you could offer and then when you launch that, you can go back to that person and say, “You know what? When we met two years ago, you really impacted me.” And that person’s then going to want to collaborate with you.

Semester Four Write an e-book

So semester four: write an E-book. So take all of those blog posts that you’ve been writing over the last year, all that research you’ve been collecting and write an E-book. This E-book is supposed to be really just simple, where you’re taking those blog posts and maybe adding some stories to make it more interesting – chapter 1, 2, 3, 4 – from all of your most popular blog posts. And then you’re going to write a 20- to 30-page E-book.

So really, you’re taking information you’ve already provided, you’re adapting it to an E-book and then you’re building an audience. What you’re doing there is you’re making something that is mind-blowing. Now don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Just the fact that you’re in grad school and you have this information really is mind-blowing. We really underestimate how much information we have even as a grad student. So that’s what you’re going to work on in your fourth semester, an E-book.

Get the Best Counseling Internship

So your fifth semester, you’re planning to graduate. Maybe you’re only doing a 4-semester program so you’re going to want to speed up this process. So you’re preparing to graduate, but your main thing is to go from being a student to being a professional. As a professional, you want to be out there, you want to dress up a little bit, you want to do networking, you’re going to meet people, reach out and really say, “How do I go from being a student, from having this mindset of a student where I just do it just to get through to really launching a private practice?”

Now if you start with this mentality at the beginning of graduate school, it’s going to really fast-forward your progress, and instead of just being like most people where they make 30,000, they make 40,000 then they might a get a supervisor job and make 50, 000 dollars a year, you might start by putting some time in the trenches, but then you can launch your private practice, you’ll be well-known and you already have that expertise. And you’ll see that compared to your peers, you’re going to grow a lot faster because you put in that time in graduate school rather than just sitting around getting a regular job.

So let’s summarize

Your grad school plan is that you’re going to start blogging. Take those papers and reuse them. Then you’re going to launch your social media strategy. As well, you’re going to then network with people that are doing things that you think you might want to do. Fourth semester, you’re going to write a book, an E-book with all that information that you’ve already provided and that you’ve done in your blog, and then you’re going to have an awesome internship to launch into your profession.