From the Classroom to the Field: What Grad School Taught Me About Being a Better Socio-Therapist
Emma Langsford UA’23, C’25 and Jim Stellar
We’ve followed EL’s journey in a series of blogs, starting from her transition from UAlbany to Columbia University Teacher’s College, followed by her experience starting graduate school, then her experience working while being a student. This blog continues that exploration of the cognitive-emotional decision-making associated with this next step, now that she has a formal post-graduation job as a Socio-Therapist Supervisor with Graham Windham. This comes after working while in school as a Socio-Therapist at Little Flower. EL has thoughts about eventually pursuing a doctoral degree, but, for now, we want to write about how past and future work experiences shape her career development thinking, enabling her to grow and serve her long-term goal of helping kids. This blog focuses on what happens after the master’s degree. It fits with the topic of JS’ forthcoming co-authored book “Professional Wisdom.” So, what is the experience of working and being a student full-time, and how does the knowledge from both areas intersect?
EL: Graduating with my Master’s in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University Teachers College marked the end of two chapters. I am stepping into a new role as a Socio-Therapist Supervisor at Graham Windham, following two years of working on the ground as a Socio-Therapist at Little Flower Children and Family Services while attending school full-time. This moment has brought much reflection, not just on what I’ve learned in the classroom or at work, but on how those two worlds intersected in surprising and powerful ways.
JS: In our last blog, which we wrote right before EL entered her second year of her master’s program, we discussed how she navigated and balanced being a student and a front-line worker. Now that you’ve graduated, how has that dual experience shaped the way you think about your work and your future?
EL: After starting my master’s program, I quickly realized that being a student made me significantly better at my job. Each week, I’d sit in a lecture on trauma theory or adolescent development, then go to work the next day and see it play out in real time. I wasn’t just absorbing the material. I was applying it, testing it, and reinterpreting it based on the realities of my clients’ lives. That feedback loop made everything stick. Conversely, the work I did in foster care shaped the way I approached my education. While my program didn’t include clinical hours, my job as a socio-therapist allowed a kind of experiential learning that was just as valuable. I brought real cases into the classroom, grounding theoretical conversations in lived examples. In one particularly impactful class, Race, Leadership, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline, I learned to recognize the structural inequities that push youth toward the juvenile legal system. I saw those exact systems at play in my clients’ lives, where frequent school transfers, racialized discipline, and trauma-related behaviors made justice-involvement feel inevitable for too many kids. My job became a living laboratory, and my education gave me the tools to use.
JS: This is an example of what we might call “professional wisdom”, when lived experience and academic knowledge come together to inform each other. When we published our last blog, EL, you were in the early stages of selecting a topic for your master’s thesis. Did you find that this interplay between work and school played a role in shaping your thesis topic?
EL: I definitely did! My thesis topic was completely shaped by my work. In my sessions, I noticed that many of the youth I worked with struggled to conceptualize the future. This isn’t surprising. Children with complex trauma often live in a constant state of survival, with little bandwidth to think beyond the present. I tried to find tools that could help my clients build future orientation, something critical to goal setting, emotional regulation, and resilience, but I found that there weren’t any easily accessible, trauma-informed resources out there. So, I created one. My thesis focused on translating psychological research on future orientation into tools that could be easily implemented by providers like me. That entire project grew from what I was seeing at work, but it was shaped by what I was learning in school. It’s a perfect example of how fieldwork and academic training don’t just complement each other, they can create new ideas, and generate first-hand knowledge of the barriers we try to address in psychological research.
JS: That’s exactly the kind of integration we hope to encourage when we talk about “professional wisdom.” It’s not just that theory informs practice; practice also informs theory. So we can see how your professional work impacted your schooling, how about the opposite?
EL: Another key area of growth for me was learning how to make clinical decisions on the spot. In school, you’re often encouraged to pause, reflect, and discuss before reaching a conclusion. In session, this luxury doesn’t exist. You have to respond to a client mid-crisis, sometimes with limited information and high emotional stakes. At first, this was overwhelming, and I would constantly second-guess myself, but over time, I developed instincts grounded in both academic knowledge and lived experience.
Now, I’m stepping into a leadership role in my new job. The transition from front-line worker to supervisor feels like both a leap and a natural evolution. I’ll be guiding socio-therapists through the same terrain I just walked, helping them navigate the hard realities of this work while building their frameworks of practice. My degree not only made me eligible on paper for a supervisory position, but it also gave me the skills and knowledge about systems, trauma, and youth development, to guide how I will support my team.
Doing frontline work while being a full-time student was exhausting. There were moments when I’d leave a difficult session and have to sit through a two-hour lecture while emotionally and physically drained. But the real world, the earthiness of the work, grounded me. It reminded me why I wanted to pursue this degree in the first place: to make systems better.
