Double check that your graduate course work meets all the requirements. The BBS lists accredited and approved schools,  so you can see if your program is on the list.  If not, it is possible to take CEUs that meet the BBS criteria.

Submit your weekly experience logs in date order. This will not only make for a smoother review of your weekly logs, but ensures that you’ve gone back through your signed statements and know that they are all present.  If you do find that you’ve misplaced a weekly experience sheet, don’t worry, you’ve got all your hours still logged on TYH.  Scroll back through your weeks, reprint and submit to your supervisor.

Include all signed experience verification logs. Double check each sheet to make sure your hours add up and that each sheet includes signatures in the proper place.  This is the time you want to dot all your i’s and cross your t’s.

Are your transcripts in a sealed envelope? This is a must for the BBS.

Don’t forget your payment! After making it through your grad program, successfully logging 3000 hours and beginning to prep for your exam, the last reason you would want to be denied is for forgetting to submit payment.
For additional information on the application process, contact the BBS with your questions.

So how do you go about starting the process?

Determine who you’re looking for. Begin your search by consciously thinking about where you are in your career and where you would like to go after licensure.  Do you plan on honing in on a specialty, starting a private practice or desire to do group work?  Assessing the path that you want to pursue will help to gauge and guide who will be able to help you grow in the areas that are most important to you.

Know what you want from the relationship. Take time to gain a clear understanding of what you are looking for in the relationship.  Insight into your goals and desired results will ensure not only that you find a suitable mentor but help determine roles and expectations in your relationship.  A mentor-mentee relationship can take many forms.  It can be a monthly lunch, a quarterly phone call or a steady stream of e-mails.

Use Your Network. Start with the connections that you already have. CAMFT has a mentor program for pre-licensed/newly licensed MFTs in place and can connect you with seasoned colleagues in the field. Another option is to reach out to your school’s alumni association and see if they have a formal mentoring program.  If not, contact a faculty member you respect or the student services agency if they have suggestions about possible mentors.

Clean Up Your Contacts: Most e-mail programs have a feature that cache your contacts and autofills e-mail addresses as you type.  While this can be a good thing, it can also create confusion when a contact moves addresses or uses multiple e-mail addresses. Spend the time now culling and organizing your e-mail contacts to avoid confusion later.

Move E-Mails Out of Your Inbox: By keeping your read e-mails your inbox, you risk the chance of missing something important on days when keeping up with your new mail gets daunting. Mail providers like Gmail allow users to create labels and file message away for later access.  Once you’ve addressed the e-mail, take advantage these labels and folders. We all know physical clutter can be overwhelming and digital clutter is no different.

Use Dropbox: We’ve recommended the file syncing service before, but the benefits cannot be overstated. With 2GB of free storage space you can keep files PDFs, documents, photos and more organized and accessible from your smart phone or any computer you use.

Simplify Your Feed: If you have dozens of RSS feeds, chances are you’re over subscribed. Though it’s great to get your news and information from a variety of sources, trying to keep up with every blogger or new agency that you once found an interesting article from can leave you stressed. Don’t get us wrong, there’s nothing inherently bad in subscribing to a lot of RSS feeds, but when managing them consumes your time and energy then it’s time to begin the re-selection process.

Ban Clutter From Your Desktop: Your desktop on your personal or work computer is the gateway to your digital life. At the end of the day — or week — move all files you don’t use daily off your desktop into broad topic folders.

Create an Effective Go Bag: If you are a clinician that works at multiple sites or grad student on the go, making sure that you have what you need with you is a priority.  You’ll be the best judge of your own needs, but plan ahead bag by stocking designating one bag to always move around with. Stock it with items like a flash drive, laptop extension cord, writing utensils, business cards and your favorite worksheets for clients. When you keep your bag stocked, you can spend less time wondering if you remembered the necessities and more time on your work.

The change in law limits the maximum amount of client centered advocacy that can be gained as experience for licensure to 500 hours.  Actually, you can only claim up to 500 hours total from the Notes and CCA categories combined.

We are working on updating trackyourhours to accommodate these rule changes and plan to release an update in February.

Please continue to log your hours as you normally would. The changes we are making will not affect how you enter hours, only how we do some calculations and how we report the Valid hours count to you.

We will be sending updates via email, twitter, and facebook.

To start using the program, all you have to do is download Dropbox to your desktop for 2GB of free storage — or upgrade to 50GB for $10 per month. And as long as you have your classmates or coworkers email address, you can share a folder with them – its that easy.

Plus, Dropbox can help to keep and organize all your PDF articles and resources on a topic, share them with other clinicians, and let your access them from anywhere you can use your smartphone.

www.dropbox.com

We also wanted to pass along a note from the BBS on the application process:

“All applicants for the LPCC program should allow for a significant
delay in processing.  The Board is currently unable to provide an estimated
length of time for processing applications. Applications are generally processed
in the order of date received, but the more complex evaluations may take
more time.  You will be notified in writing once your application has been
evaluated and/or of your initial eligibility to take the examination.

Thank you for your patience,

Board of Behavioral Science”

PsycExplorer HD aggregates each day’s Psych news from the web and delivers it in a user-friendly manner to your iPad or iPhone. Not only does the app pull from top news sites and peer reviewed journals, but they source a host of videos and podcasts.  A great resource to keep up in the field.

For clinicians themselves and to use as patient education guide, 3D Brain is an app for the iPad and iPhone to illustrate what happens when the brain is injured — through trauma or addiction — and how brain structures are involved in mental illness. Each detailed structure comes with information on functions, disorders, brain damage, case studies, and links to modern research. And best of all, it’s free.

For those of us that are in practicums or internships with where we’re required to use ICD-9 codes for billing purposes, it can be a time consuming hassle searching the right code.  The ICD9 Consultant 2011, a free app, makes it easy to search by diagnosis or code number without flipping through a 30-pound book.

The DSM remains the go-to manual in the mental health field for diagnosis and information on disorders.  At $46.99 DSM Criteria is pricey but puts hundreds of pages of information at your fingertips including criteria and codes as well as NOS and specific diagnoses related to substance abuse.