Advice Needed - Placement Determines Future?
I just was offered a community placement on the spot in my town in Ontario for my MSW.
It's with what seems like a fantastic organization that is able to offer a lot to the broader community with many branches to it. I thought I was interviewing for a position for an individual counselling role, as they have a branch of the company that offers free and reduced fee psychotherapy. Instead I interviewed for a group faciliation and community service navigator focused placement. It sounds like I might get to co-faciliate a DBT group, do some programming at the local library, and put my foot in a lot of other areas of the community work they do. I clarified and would NOT be able to do any individual counselling as they already have their students for that area, but I could potentially do informational interviews with the therapists who work in that branch.
The organization is also hiring pretty consistsently at rates that make sense to me as a potential new grad, so it would be great to get my foot in somewhere that may be hiring when I finish school.
My goal in the field is to work in palliative care, hospice, and down the line in private practice as a psychotherapist but I expect to work in frontline for a long while (5-10 years) before I get all the certifications I need to practice psychotherapy the way I'd want to.
I am thinking about pursing this placement and accepting it. My resume is in the cue to be reviewed by my local hospitals but there's no guarantee they'll be interviewing me. My local hospices have also already taken on students, they have a relationship with the university closest to me and not the more metropolitan one I go to.
I'm a bit nervous about my future in the field pursing what I want if I don't get the "perfect" placement. Does anyone have any advice on how to move foward? Part of me thinks if I make the best of this placement there are always opportunities to move into different parts of the field as long as I'm committed to continuing my learning journey post grad school. Thoughts?