Naomi Feldkamp, M.S. School Counseling

Why Porter

“I taught life science to seventh-graders in Arrowhead Lake for six years. I loved it. But every year there were three or four kids whose real problem wasn't cell division, and I'd walk them down to a counselor who had 480 other students. I wanted to be the person at the end of that hallway.”

Naomi is in the second year of the M.S. in School Counseling, a licensure-track program with a full-year internship split between an elementary and a secondary school. She chose Porter for that split, and for practical reasons: “I could keep my house, my courses were in the evening the first year, and the Graduate School answered my email the same day.”

The hands-on part

This fall Naomi is in SCOUN 570, Internship I, three days a week at the Campus School, under a licensed school counselor. In January she moves to Porter Falls High School for Internship II.

• Small groups: she runs a six-week lunch group for fourth-graders whose parents are deployed or work away from home. “Seven kids, one bag of pretzels, a lot of feelings about video calls.”
• Classroom lessons: monthly lessons on friendship and conflict for grades 2–5. “Being a former teacher helps here. I know how to get a room quiet without raising my voice.”
• Supervision: a weekly recorded session reviewed with her faculty supervisor, line by line.

She also holds a half-time graduate assistantship in the First-Generation Center, where she helps plan workshops on financial aid and course registration. “It's the same work, ten years later. Seventeen-year-olds and nineteen-year-olds ask a lot of the same questions. They just phrase them with more confidence.”

A hard semester

“Leaving a full salary to go back to school at 31 was scarier than I said out loud. First spring, my car insurance went up, the furnace went out, and I realized my assistantship stipend was exactly one furnace short. I cried in the parking lot behind Millwright Hall, which I'm told is a tradition.

“The Graduate School has an emergency fund I didn't know existed, and the Graduate Student Association has a peer-mentor list that put me in touch with a third-year who'd done the same math. She taught me to budget in terms of semesters, not months. I'm still in the program. The furnace is fine.”

The other hard part was emotional. “As a teacher you get to fix things. As a counselor you mostly get to sit with things. My supervisor told me my job is not to make a kid feel better by Friday. That took me a full semester to believe.”

What the program asks of you

Naomi is candid that the program is a lot, especially in the internship year. Her current week:

• Three days at the Campus School, 7:45 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., which counts toward the 600 supervised internship hours the license requires.
• Twenty hours of assistantship work in the First-Generation Center, mostly afternoons and one evening workshop a month.
• Two evening classes, Tuesday and Thursday, 5:30 to 8:15 p.m., in a cohort of fourteen.
• One hour of individual supervision and ninety minutes of group supervision each week.

“Our cohort is mostly former teachers, a couple of people from social services and two who came straight from undergrad. The straight-from-undergrad people know the theory cold. The former teachers know where the kid hides when the fire alarm goes off. We need both, and the professors put us in mixed groups on purpose.”

She credits her adviser, a former elementary counselor, for helping her pick an internship site that would stretch her. “I asked for middle school because it was comfortable. She said, ‘Then start with seven-year-olds.’ She was right.”

What’s next

Naomi will finish in May 2027 and apply for her school counselor license over the summer. She hopes to work in a rural middle school, ideally one that hires counselors “at a ratio somebody would be willing to say out loud.”

Her advice to teachers thinking about it: “Talk to your own building's counselor first. Ask what they'd do differently. Then look at programs with a real internship, not a weekend practicum. You need both ends of the K–12 hallway.”