Practicing for a Future in Clinical Counseling

Throughout her time at Washington, Mary Clymer ’27 has used internship experiences to determine and empower her career trajectory

As Mary Clymer ’27 prepares for her senior year as a psychology major with a clinical counseling concentration, she’s thinking not only of her last year, but about what comes after she walks the graduation stage.

Clymer is looking ahead to graduate school, where she hopes to pursue a master’s degree in social work and eventually become a licensed clinical social worker.

“I want to be a therapist and eventually start my own private practice,” Clymer said. “I’m really interested in treating trauma and eating disorders.”

Throughout her time at Washington, Clymer has pursued internships to help her move toward these goals and figure out what she actually wants to do as a career. This summer, Clymer found an internship at the Maryland Anxiety Center.

“It’s hard to find undergraduate internships in mental health or in psychotherapy,” Clymer said.  “Usually, internship opportunities are for graduate students trying to fulfill supervision hours.”

Clymer has previously interned at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Pro-Bono Counseling, and Society for Women’s Health Research, which was an Explore America Summer Internship through the Washington College Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. She also has a wellness internship with the Washington College Wellness Advocacy Coaches (WAC2). From each of these experiences, Clymer has discovered what she likes: working with people on an individual level.

The Maryland Anxiety Center internship is an educational training program internship. Interns like Clymer go into the private practice and work with a supervisor and director of the practice.

“She’s teaching us everything about what it means to be in a private practice, about different cases she has, how she treats anxiety and OCD,” Clymer said. “We have all these educational opportunities where we’re learning about diagnoses and cases and have the opportunity to ask real-time questions to different clinicians about how they handle certain cases and situations.”

Clymer said the internship is exactly what she wants to do and without the support she recieved from the Hodson Trust Internship Fund through the Center for Career Development, she would not have had the opportunity to work there.

Maryland Anxiety Center focuses on obsessive compulsive and anxiety disorders. Through the internship, Clymer has learned about different disorders, how they manifest, and treatment types.

“We learned a lot about the physiology of fear and how fear is processed throughout the body,” Clymer said.

As an educational internship, Clymer has two major projects to showcase her learning. Her midterm project consisted of a case presentation diagnosing four hypothetical patients based on descriptions provided.

“That was a lot of fun just to look at the client’s symptoms and be able to diagnose them,” she said. “It was really informative and put into action everything that we’ve been learning.”

By the end of the summer, Clymer will also have written a scholarly article for the center based on a topic of her interest that she learned about during the internship.

— MacKenzie Brady '21