What I Wish I Knew Before Starting My School Counseling Degree

When I started my school counseling degree, I thought I had a pretty good sense of what I was walking into. I’d been in schools. I’d worked with students. I understood what counseling looked like from the outside.

But the truth is, there were so many things I didn’t know—about the training, the emotional labor, the workload, the writing, and even the difference between the work of a school counselor versus a clinical mental health counselor. If you’re beginning your program or even just considering it, here’s what I wish someone had told me.

1. School Counseling vs. Clinical Counseling: It’s Not the Same Degree (and Not the Same Day-to-Day Work)

Before enrolling, I thought I understood the difference, but grad school made the distinctions much clearer:

School Counseling

• Works primarily within educational systems

• Focuses on academic advising, career development, and social-emotional support

• Provides short-term, solution-focused counseling, not long-term therapy

• Coordinates behavior intervention meetings, 504s/IEPs, parent communication, and crisis response

• Advocates for school-wide social-emotional programming

Clinical Mental Health Counseling

• Trains professionals for diagnosis, long-term treatment, and therapeutic interventions

• Involves working in community agencies, private practice, hospitals, rehab centers, etc.

• Requires deeper study in psychopathology, assessment, and treatment planning

• Often involves a heavier emphasis on supervised clinical hours

Both track require empathy, patience, and strong relational skills—but the scope, setting, and responsibilities can be dramatically different. Knowing this earlier would have helped me shape my expectations about the role, the workload, and the specific skills I needed to focus on.

My program is unique in that it is a Master's of Education in Counseling, with an emphasis in School Counseling. This means I am eligible to sit for the NCE or NCMHCE exam and earn my LPC. This is something I'm seriously considering due to many factors that I won't go into right now. So, this degree really is the best of both worlds– I will be a licensed School Counselor and an LPC. My sights are still set on child and adolescent therapy, even as an LPC!

2. Balancing Work, Studies, and Family Was… A Lot

Everyone warns you that graduate school is demanding, but I don’t think anyone can really prepare you for what it’s like to juggle:

• A job (I was teaching part-time)

• Internship hours

• A family

  • and a husband with his own busy schedule including some time away from home

• Zoom meetings and classes

• Reading...and more reading

• Writing...more writing...and even more writing

• Group projects...so many.

• Managing my own self-care, relationships, and sanity!

Somehow, I managed to accelerate my program. This is typically unheard of but, I was using my spouse's GI Bill (partially) and it doesn't make sense if you aren't attending "full-time." I was taking two courses at a time when the typical student in my program was taking one at a time. I knew I needed to do it this way because I was working my husband's deployment schedules and we were currently on a shore tour (no sea duty!) This meant I was doing double duty.

It started out pretty easy. I was really into it, and excited about my journey. By semester 3, I was close to burn out.

3. Writing Papers Is Basically a Part-Time Job

I knew there would be papers. I did NOT anticipate the volume of them or how much APA formatting would haunt me in my sleep.

Here’s what no one told me:

You will become fluent in APA even if you don’t want to.

Running headers. Hanging indents. In-text citations. Reference pages that refuse to format correctly. It's all part of the journey.

You will write papers when you are exhausted.

After work. After class. After your internship. After bedtime routines. After you’ve already spent three hours reading journal articles.

And yes… you will care about proper page numbers.

A surprise to me, too.

Things that made my writing life easier:

• APA Manual (7th Edition) – yes, the real one

• Grammarly Premium or another editing tool

• A standalone keyboard for my laptop

• A cute mouse 🐭

• My iPad Pro and

• Apple pen (WORTH the investment. This changed my note-taking forever.)

(I may receive a very small commission from any affiliate links shared, but that doesn't change your cost. I promise to use any commission for tuition 😉)

4. Imposter Syndrome Comes Free with Tuition

At some point, you will think:

• Should I even be in this program?

• Do I actually know what I’m doing?

• How are my classmates so put together?

• Will I ever feel like a real counselor?

The answer is yes.
But not right away.

The beautiful part is that confidence comes through the work—through seeing students, practicing skills, stumbling through your first sessions, and slowly finding your rhythm. Now that I'm in internship, my skills are finally coming together and becoming stronger with more and more experience.

5. Self-Care Isn’t Optional—It’s a Graduation Requirement

Between coursework, internship, family responsibilities, and work, school counseling students often give everything they have… until they have nothing left. Ironically, many of my courses required self-care assignments that had to be completed (writing reflections, making a video, etc).

I wish I had learned earlier that:

• Saying no is a form of self-care

• Rest is productive

• You don’t need to volunteer for every opportunity

• Burnout doesn’t make you “strong”—it makes you leave the field

• A yoga mat and 15 minutes of breathing can literally save your semester

  • Here is the yoga mat I prefer (did I also mention I'm a registered yoga teacher?) 🧘‍♀️

6. You Don’t Have to Know Everything

This might be the most important lesson.

You don’t need to:

• Memorize every intervention

• Be the perfect student

• Understand every theory immediately

• Nail every paper on the first draft

• Know how to support every student perfectly

What you do need is compassion, a willingness to learn, ethical judgment, and the humility to ask faculty and supervisors questions. Professionalism also goes a long way, especially in group projects! Don't be the one that doesn't turn their part in on time! (Yes, that happened- not me, though!)

Final Thoughts

If you’re beginning your clinical or school counseling journey—or you’re in the thick of it—know that you are not alone. This degree is transformative. It pushes you, shapes you, humbles you, and prepares you in ways you won’t fully appreciate until you’re actually sitting across from a student who needs your presence more than your perfection.

And if you’re still choosing a program, preparing for your first semester, or gearing up for internship hours… I hope this gives you a clearer, more honest picture of what’s ahead.

You’ve got this.
And you’re going to make an incredible counselor.