Life events can often shape how we choose the career path we follow and how we want to make a difference in the lives of others. For Jennifer, a significant event in her teenage years impacted her significantly and led her to learn how she could use her love of music as a career in a way she had not imagined before. Even if you think you know something about Music Therapy, you will leave this conversation knowing so much more and be inspired by the limitless possibilities to help others in ways you didn’t know existed. If you have any interest in music, psychology, the medical field, physical therapy, or inventive ways to help people, you need to hear Jennifer’s story!
If you are interested in learning more about the field of Music Therapy, please visit The American Music Therapy Association at www.musictherapy.org.
Life events can often shape how we choose the career path we follow and how we want to make a difference in the lives of others. For Jennifer, a significant event in her teenage years impacted her significantly and led her to learn how she could use her love of music as a career in a way she had not imagined before. Even if you think you know something about Music Therapy, you will leave this conversation knowing so much more and be inspired by the limitless possibilities to help others in ways you didn’t know existed. If you have any interest in music, psychology, the medical field, physical therapy, or inventive ways to help people, you need to hear Jennifer’s story!
If you are interested in learning more about the field of Music Therapy, please visit The American Music Therapy Association at www.musictherapy.org.
Thank you for joining us today on Paths in Progress. I'm your host, Carrie Young. On this podcast, people in a variety of career fields, talk about their journey from choosing their college, deciding which majors and minors to pursue, their first jobs out of college, and all of the hurdles, detours and victories along their path through today. Our goal is to help students hear about a variety of exciting opportunities out there and understand what day-to-day life is like in these careers. I hope you enjoy and learn from our story today. Thanks for listening.
Carrie:Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We are here today with Jennifer Townsend. She is a board certified music therapist, she's a professor, and she's the manager of creative arts at a major hospital. She has both her bachelor's and master's degrees in music therapy, and she's held several positions within music therapy, and we will get into that today. So, Jennifer, thanks so much for joining us.
Jennifer:Thanks for having me, Carrie.
Carrie:I'm happy you're here because I know this is a field that a lot of people are interested in and I'm excited to dive in. So can you take us back to your high school years and tell us a little bit about what you were thinking regarding your future and your career path and how you went about looking for colleges?
Jennifer:Absolutely. So I started playing the flute in fifth grade, and so I was a band person. Really enjoyed it, really loved music. I also did choir and, music became a really important part of my life. I thought that I wanted to be a woodwinds performer. I thought I wanted to be in the Disney orchestra was kind of my dream as a freshman. Then I went to school in a town just outside of Dallas and my high school, along with some high schools in the area experienced a series of teen suicides. Friends of mine and as it would to anyone, it kind of rocked my world kind of changed my thinking. And, I began a peer mentor group with caught with other students and the guidance counselors at my school. We did a training and then we would sit in the office, essentially for one period of the day, throughout my junior year, where students could come and talk to another student. And there were rules around it, right? If they've talked about harming themselves, harming someone else, we were going to get the counselor involved things like that. Yeah, and we had guidance from the counselors but it was really a space that students could talk to a peer and I loved it. It just filled a spot in me and I felt like the purpose and the intention behind the conversations and the way that the program was going was really Wonderful and purposeful for my life. I started thinking about other careers like counseling and psychology. And my guidance counselor introduced me to music therapy. So kudos to her, because I don't know how many guidance high school guidance counselors knew about music therapy at the time, or even know about it now, but she did, and she said, well, have you ever heard of music therapy? Because I was saying, you know, I don't want to give up music altogether. It's so important in my life. And so, I ended up doing an independent studies, my senior year of high school focused on music therapy. And so I interviewed music therapists. I researched music therapy. I wrote up a literature review. I went down to Sam Houston State University and interviewed Professors there and was able to give a presentation to my high school about what music therapy is. And by that time I had already applied to schools and this was it. This is what I was going to do. And so I feel very blessed that I learned about music therapy early on because so many of my colleagues came to it a little bit later in their careers, right, they started out in a performance or education, or sometimes psychology, and then learned about music therapy a little bit later.
Carrie:So how did you start? Was your counselor helping you look for college programs in that area or how did you go about that? Did you choose something close to your home? Like what was your search process like?
Jennifer:Yeah. So because I did the independent studies, I had already interviewed several music therapy professors and had spent time observing classes at Sam Houston State University, which there were closer programs. TWU has a program, SMU has a program, but somehow Sam Houston State felt right and, the professor there was so open to helping me in my discovery and exploration of music therapy. That I really wanted to go and then study with her. So I was pretty set on going to Sam Houston State University, Because I had a relationship with the professor already. I didn't do a ton of exploring in my undergrad. Once I got that acceptance letter I kind of stopped looking at all the other schools and knew I wanted to study with her in particular. My time in undergrad, at Sam Houston State was very behavioral based. It's a traditionally a behavioral based school. While there, I started going to music therapy conferences, I had the opportunity to go to a national conference. I learned about different models and practices in music therapy. And I really love having the foundation of behavioral approaches, and neurologic, physiologic models of music therapy as my foundation. I was also very intrigued by more psychodynamic and psycho emotional practices in music therapy. And I knew that the Northeast was sort of a hub for that type of practice, just something very different. And so I thought I wanted to do my graduate work in the Northeast. So upon graduating, I looked for jobs in that area specifically so that I could establish residency and be able to better afford tuition when after a few years of practicing, I would be ready.
Carrie:So can you talk a little bit about getting licensed as a music therapist because I know some students who know early like you did, you know, do look for it at the undergraduate level, but there are so many that don't discover this until they're already in another undergraduate program, whether it's music, something else, or perhaps psychology. There's different ways to go about this with different combinations of undergraduate and graduate degrees, right? And then you just mentioned you were going to practice in between your undergraduate and graduate degrees. So can you talk about the different options there for students who have an interest in this?
Jennifer:Sure. So right now, music therapy is a bachelor's level entry profession, meaning that at the bachelor's level, you can sit for the board certification exam, which is a national exam and become a board certified music therapist. So most places in the U S you can practice music therapy at the bachelor's level. We consider a master's level to gain advanced competencies in the field. However, there are different States that have licensure. That have legal title recognition for music therapy. And then one of those states requires a master's degree before getting your licensure, Texas does not have a licensure yet. So, the bachelor's level and board certification is sufficient for beginning practice.
Carrie:Okay. So for you, because you were licensed after your undergraduate degree, what were some of the reasons for you to seek a graduate degree?
Jennifer:Well, coming from high school and having these experiences that were very settled in mental health, right? I thought I wanted to do work in mental health and in psychiatry. I enjoyed Working in behavioral models that were, you could do some mental health work, you could do some focus work, you could do grounding, but I wanted to go deeper with patients in that psychological framework. And I knew I didn't have all of the skills that I needed to really do what I specifically wanted to do. I felt like it was important for me to explore programs that had more of a psycho emotional, psycho dynamic model of practice and it was never that I wanted to only do one or the other. I always felt like the right thing, the best therapist I could be would be to integrate these different models and meet patients where they were. I was from early on, I was really drawn to humanistic philosophies and practices. And so I knew that I wanted to be kind of well rounded. Which is what led me to go on and get my master's degree in music therapy, in a more psychodynamic model.
Carrie:Can you explain what that means for students who don't know, the humanistic perspective you were interested in and also the psychodynamic model?
Jennifer:Yes, so the humanistic model, is a holistic view of a person. It takes into account the different aspects of being human and Emphasizes the individual having power and agency to make their own changes, right? So the idea that you have it within you, you just need some help finding it maybe. And we can explore together so that you can come to a place where you can find the answers and resolution to what you're seeking. So that's kind of a humanistic, approach to psychology really. But it can apply to music therapy, can apply to art therapy, can apply to a variety of therapies, right? And then when we talk about psychodynamic therapy. The idea behind it is that it goes a little more in depth. And hails from psychoanalysis, but is not as analytical if you will. It still emphasizes the unconscious process that there are things that happen to us that we may not be aware of, feelings we have that we may not be aware of that influence our behaviors. And so exploring that is important, but it's not so specific to our childhood specifically, or some of those different aspects, we talk about defense mechanisms. We talk about shaping our personality, shaping our behaviors, in psychodynamic approaches and really focus on the patient therapist relationship as the key to change.
Carrie:So backing up a little bit between the undergraduate level with a music therapy degree and the graduate level, can you talk a little bit about the types of classes a student would see in each of those programs, and perhaps like the clinical experience? You know, a music student, may have some concerns at the undergraduate level about how much they get to play their instrument or perform or what other types of music courses they're also taking with the music therapy classes. And then at the graduate level, we're usually getting more specific in our field, right? So can you talk a little bit about the coursework in each of those degrees and what students could expect generally from those?
Jennifer:Yes, for sure. And I think it's also important to recognize that there's another entrance to the field, which are the equivalency program. So there are mostly master's equivalency programs. I believe there are still a few bachelor equivalency programs out there as well, where if you already have a bachelor's degree in music, you can take a master's equivalency, which means that you'll take those core music therapy courses from the bachelor's level and then some of the master's level courses, and complete a master's degree or a bachelor's degree that allows you to sit for the board certification. So it still meets the process, the accreditation requirements for sitting for the board exam. Okay. The differences are, and it varies by school a little bit. And so I would recommend people that are looking to go into music therapy, spend some time exploring different models of music therapy and finding out which schools teach in those frameworks. But in general at the bachelor's level, many of those degrees are in the music department, right? They're in the school of music. So you're going to take woodwinds and you're going to take ensemble. You're going to take theory, musicianship, all of the music history, all of the general core music classes. Almost anybody in a music degree is going to take those classes, right? They're part of being in a school of music. And then, you'll have private lessons in your personal instrument. And usually it's in the classical form, or in the jazz form that you're studying. You'll have your courses that are related to music therapy, such as abnormal psychology, anatomy and physiology. Usually there's a statistics class that's required. So some of your core classes and elective classes get funneled into these courses that are relative to the field of music therapy. And then you have a series of classes that are specifically teaching music therapy methods and skills, observation, data collection, how to write notes, more importantly, How the body responds to music, how the physiology responds to music, how neurology responds to music, how we can use music for expression and, to learn coping skills, really the techniques that we use in therapy. And with that comes practicum and internship. In an accredited degree program for music therapy at the bachelor's level, you're required to fulfill 1200 hours of supervised clinical work. And that can happen both in the practicum setting and in the internship setting. So practicum happens while you're still taking classes in school and traditionally it's at a facility in your area or maybe with a music therapist that's in private practice, nearby your school and you go maybe once a week with that person for a few hours and then observe them. Start to learn how to do a few of the techniques and come back and have a practicum class where you discuss what you're learning and what you're doing in there with additional supervision. And then once you've completed your coursework, that's when you find a, an internship. Internships are traditionally six months long and they're 40 hours a week. So it's like a full time job for six months where you're doing music therapy under the supervision of a music therapist, to get additional hands on training before you sit for the board certification exam. At the master's level, it is like what you said, it's a little more geared toward the music therapist. And so there are not as many music based classes in terms of ensemble requirements and private lesson requirements. However, music is being used regularly in your music therapy classes as you continue to explore and practice different approaches and integrating different models of therapy. Usually at the master's level, there's a little more information about research and how to do research in music therapy, both qualitative and quantitative. As we hail from the social sciences, it's important for us to understand how to utilize both qualitative and quantitative methods to describe, explain, and demonstrate the value of the therapy.
Carrie:So for students who are interested In becoming a therapist, I would assume that most students interested in music therapy are musicians in some capacity or have had music be a significant part of their lives. For students interested in this and maybe trying to decide between them, what are some of the primary differences between being a traditional therapist coming from like a psychology degree and a licensure versus the type of work that a music therapist would do? Can you help explain that for students who know that they have interests in these areas but may not really understand the difference in the work?
Jennifer:So I think there's a lot of flexibility in the field of music therapy to define yourself as a therapist. If you will, music therapists can work in rehabilitation. They can work in special education. They can work in elder care facilities. They can Work in wellness. They can work in psychiatric clinics. They can work in medicine, medical facilities, hospitals, just a variety of places. And the work does look a little bit different in each of those places. So if you are interested in working with children with special needs in the education setting, your work is going to be mandated essentially by the IEP and your practices there are going to be focused on maybe social skills and some academics even. Whereas if you're working in a rehab, you're really going to be looking at neurologic aspects of music and how do we prime the brain for physical recovery. If you're working in a medical hospital, you might be working on physiologic parameters like weaning off of a ventilator or managing blood pressure, heart rate, these things. Through music intervention, if you're working in psychiatry or psychology or counseling, mental wellness, with one of those teams, you're probably going to be more focused on emotional expression and coping strategies. So all of that said, there's a variety of work that can be done and these different areas of work require different schools of thought. That's not to say that there's not crossover and foundational aspects of music therapy that follow any population you go in, or that if you're working in rehab, you could be providing support for a patient who's had a stroke to relearn their gait, but if they break down emotionally in the moment, you still have the training to walk them through that emotion and get them to a space where they can come back to their rehab and focus on the physical part of what they need to do. So to answer your question, that's kind of all preamble to the differences between the two, you know, really when it comes down to, if you're working in more of a mental health area. You're utilizing music to access expression, coping, processing. So you might be utilizing techniques like lyric analysis or song writing or song diagnosis, listening to a song and giving your patient the chance to diagnose the person singing, or the person the song might be about to learn for psychoeducation purposes, versus talking, right? So in traditional counseling, we would consider that talk therapy. There's a lot of discussion and there's discussion and verbal processing within music therapy as well. The impetus for the change really comes from the therapeutic relationship within the music. We often talk about music as the third person in the therapy. So you have the therapist, you have the patient and you have the music and the patient has an experience in the music and the therapist has an experience in the music and the exploration of that experience can lead to new knowledge, new awareness. New opportunities for coping, new strategy development. And sometimes it's just that we don't have the words to describe what we're feeling, but the music can describe it and give us an opening for that. Hmm.
Carrie:Yeah. Was that something that you discovered back when you were talking about the teen suicides that had happened in your community and you first started becoming interested in this idea of helping people in this way in general? Was music being used in that setting? Were you all kind of relating to music or to songs? Is there any connection there?
Jennifer:You know, it wasn't necessarily in the formal practice within like the teen mentor program that we had at the high school, but certainly within my own friend group, we were all band kids, right? We were musicians and we used it to help us process and understand and connect with each other. Yeah. And so it was definitely a part of the culture of the students, even if it was not a formal part of, The practices that were being put into place to help support this group of students who were experiencing the loss of friends to suicide.
Carrie:Yeah. So you said you started in the field working before you pursued your master's degree. What types of positions are music therapists usually looking at, particularly right out of an undergraduate degree? I don't know if that makes a difference or not for somebody who just has the undergraduate degree and they're going into the field to work versus somebody coming out of a graduate program? Are you looking at different types of positions when you're first starting out? What are kind of the options that you had before you at that time and what did you choose to do?
Jennifer:So coming out of school, out of your bachelor's degree, and the employer would have their decision. But I would say that as an employer, as a hiring manager, There are certainly areas, even within the hospital, that we look for advanced practitioners, because of the level of work that they're going to be doing. So I do think that there are differences, but it's really employer based. There's not a general. you know, defining peace like there is in social work where there are different, levels of that degree that would allow you to do different things in that way. But I will say that a lot of music therapists coming out of their bachelor's. degree I see going into, private practice working under the class waiver, oftentimes. So with children with disabilities in home therapies type work, skilled nursing facilities, rehab facilities, special education medicine, in certain areas of the hospital, it seems to be more popular at the bachelor's level, but it really kind of also depends on the therapist, and some of their life experience might play a role in that as well and maturity in what they're able to take on. Right? If you're working in hospice and end of life, there's a certain level of experience and maturity that the person needs to have where they have enough self awareness. They have enough, exploration of who they are and what they believe and what they think in order to Hold space for people in that time of life over and over again without burning out and without taking it on personally. So those are really important parts of that work. I'm just speaking for me personally, as a hiring manager, I do look for specific things in a person. Skill sets, but also experience and maturity that they're able to, that I feel comfortable and like they will be safe in that space just as much as the patient will be safe in that space.
Carrie:Yeah. So what type of position did you have right out of undergrad?
Jennifer:I was in a long term acute care pediatric facility. I started out in one long term acute care pediatric facility up in the Northeast working with primarily children who had both a medical diagnosis and a developmental diagnosis that required them to live in residence. But they were acute in that they lived with a tracheotomy or on a ventilator or, in some aspect required daily medical care. And I loved it. Those kids taught me so much about life, but speaking to experience and maturity, I definitely hit some low lows unprepared for the existential questions that would come out of working with a group of children and watching children die, after having lived with these ailments for years, or sometimes not years or treating children in, low awareness states, right? There were a lot of questions that I had to come to, and I had to really explore for myself and come to terms with and feel comfortable with in order to truly provide, The space and the therapy that was most beneficial for the patients and their families. I started out in long term acute care pediatrics. I worked in that population in the Northeast at two different facilities, the entire seven years that I lived there. When I returned to Texas, I got a job in an acute care medical hospital and I worked in the neonatal intensive care unit, and on the pediatric ICU as well as, the comprehensive epilepsy team. So I kind of moved into this more acute world of acute care hospital stays and working with people at the moment of things happening versus having had been in that space for a while. And then continued working in pediatrics at a different hospital doing very similar work until I made the switch to adult care, which I was really worried about at the time, but I realized that we're really not that different from children anyway. And the part of creative arts therapies that's so brilliant is that it's creative and it's playful in that nature and that it connects us to our inner child, that allows us to explore in a different way. Gives us insight in a new way. Right. I think the arts is a socially acceptable form of play for adults.
Carrie:Right? Yeah. You referred to it a little bit earlier that you wanted to go to the graduate level to learn more. So when along this path did you make that decision? And what do you feel like were the primary benefits of doing that? Like, how did you feel different moving forward in your career once you completed your graduate work?
Jennifer:I mean, I knew that I wanted to continue learning. I knew when I was graduating with my bachelor's that there was more I wanted to do. I just loved this field and there was so much to learn and my passion really drove me. So I knew I wanted to continue learning. It took me a couple of years of living in the Northeast to get to a point where I could financially afford to pursue my graduate degree. And I ended up going to Temple University for my master's degree. By then I was working in long term pediatrics and had gotten a real true taste of the medical world and had learned that it was really my home. I felt really good there and wanted to delve into that a bit more. And so the program at Temple University, one of the professors that was there at the time was Cheryl Dillio. She has a great history in the world of medical music therapy, foundational practices. So she was a draw for me, to go to that school as well as Yocha Brat, who I find to be just the most incredible person probably, I mean, if you talk about my greatest mentor, she is way up there on that list and someone that I followed and wanted to read everything she wrote, before even pursuing graduate school. The two of them were both at Temple University, and so it just felt like the right place for me to go and learn from these people that I had been reading all of their research and studying their work. And that's what led me there.
Carrie:Well, that's good information, especially to point out, you know, to look at faculty and their research to help determine where you'd like to go. Once you left your graduate work, were you viewing your career path in a different way or were there some different types of things you wanted to do now that you'd had this extra learning experience? Like, how did that kind of change how you viewed your career path?
Jennifer:Yeah. So I had grown really close to this population of children in low awareness states, throughout my time. So I was working full time and going to school. It's a retreat style program. So we would go for intensives twice a semester, for about a week at a time. And the rest of the time we were online learners, but we were all required to have jobs in music therapy. We were all required to be board certified and. I think we had to have five years of clinical practice before applying for the degree. So we all had some experience already and we were using our experience in our learning, right? Everything that I was learning, I was applying in that population, which was just growing my ability to serve that population. One of the things that I got out of. my graduate work, I understood how to work with the children. I had that really behavioral foundation with neurologic music therapy mixed in there. And I could do the practices of breathing and behavior management and all of those things with these children, but I got much better at verbal processing and I got much better at listening with a therapeutic ear to the parents and to the family members. Family bonding became really important to me. I kind of was able to go back to some of my humanistic tendencies and start really looking at the whole picture of the children and some of the other pieces in their lives that might play an important role in their quality of life. And I started feeling just as much for the parents and the siblings as I did for the patients themselves. Which was more psycho emotional. It was more processing the experience. The children I worked with were mostly non verbal, non ambulatory. I worked specifically on a unit for ventilated patients that were living long term on the ventilator. Many of them in persistent vegetative states. The work became so powerful when I started really having these family sessions and hearing the family and supporting them, learning how to play with their child, learning how to recognize their communication. I also got the opportunity, while working there to meet Wendy McGee, who's another just stellar music therapist and has been such an influence in my career and life, and is still a great mentor to me. I'm in awe every time I get to speak to her. She works in this population as well of low awareness states and connecting with her was also a game changer in recognizing some of the ways that technology influenced communication and ability for these children to access music, and access expression through music. And interaction through music, as well as then continuing on to learn more about assessment and treatment of the children in both quantitative and qualitative ways.
Carrie:Listening to you speak about this, it sounds like there are so many different populations that music therapists have the opportunity to work with in so many different settings that you can practice music therapy in and also the various conditions of your patients, in all of these different settings. In the field in general, would students be looking to specialize or would they be looking to develop more as a generalist to be able to practice in like a wider variety of settings? Like in medicine, you know, a doctor is going to highly specialized in something and likely stay in that area long term where with music therapy is that common or is it more common to move between those different Settings and types and patient populations and everything.
Jennifer:And I think A lot of that depends on the therapist themselves and their life and what where their life brings them. But also I think it goes back to your earlier question where I would say that realistically when you come out of your bachelor's degree, it's like being a generalist. It's like you have the basic foundations to treat in any of these variety of settings. And then when you go into your graduate work, you're kind of specializing in a more particular area, but there are also undergraduate schools that lean more one way than the other, but even if they lean more one way than the other, they're going to give you the basics to work with all of these populations, right? So at basic competency, you have the general ability to work in any of these populations. At least to some capacity. I know people who. Spent a large part of their career in one working with one population and then had a switch and worked with someone else. It really depends on the person. It also depends on their life. People get married, they settle down, their spouse gets a job somewhere else. And in that area, really the place that the most music therapists work or where the job is in special education and you've been working in skilled nursing. Before that, you know, like life is going to take you different places, but there's also an opportunity to be really intentional and say, you know, I really think I found my niche. This is what I wanna get better at, and I wanna really become an expert in this area. I think there's that opportunity also. So it's really dependent on the individual and what their desires are.
Carrie:So it sounds like the field is flexible to where you could specialize in something, or if you also have the flexibility to move around and that's not discouraged or looked down upon or anything like that.
Jennifer:That's right. And I would say in the beginning, when you're first exploring the field, I encourage people to exploring all the populations. I honestly can say that I haven't found a population that I really haven't enjoyed working in that I couldn't. I could do that. I could continue working in this population, but I also know people who have said, that's not the population for me. I do not enjoy that type of work. Or that's too heavy for me. I can't live in that space. We're just, we're different people. We're all bundles of different experiences and values and ideas. And that's what makes the world so amazing. And finding those matches are just a part of life. Is
Carrie:it common in music therapy, and I guess this probably depends on area of the country too, but is it a norm for music therapists to be on a staff and likely be the only music therapist on a staff? Because you know, some professions, you're pretty much always on a team, of people where there's some professions where you're often the only person who does what you do. So is it more common to kind of be working on your own in a lot of settings, or does that really vary?
Jennifer:I think it does vary. I would say it's not unlikely to be working on your own. It's also not unlikely to be on a smaller team of people. At the same time, there are definitely places that have teams and there are clinics that are only music therapy clinics. So it really does depend, some of it depends on the population. If you work in home hospice, you're going to spend a lot of time driving from house to house, on your own, right? You'll have team meetings, maybe. A couple of times a week, but you may or may not be on the same team as the other music therapist in your hospice company because they serve the north side of the city and you serve the south side of the city or something like that. So there's connection, but it's not all the time, whereas in an institution or facility, like a hospital, you may have 2 or 3 creative arts therapists, or you may have a group of. 18. It just depends on the hospital or the organization.
Carrie:Can we talk a little bit more through the different positions you've had through your career and the different populations that you worked with? What are your days look like in a lot of these different positions?
Jennifer:Sure. So I'll share also that I interned in a facility for older adults, it was a residential facility for older adults that were Jewish and I never worked in that population after my internship, not because I didn't enjoy it, but the job that I got was on the opposite end of the spectrum with pediatrics. But still in a residential type setting, right? The children lived there. So I just put that out there to say sometimes students get so focused on finding the internship that fits the population they think they want to work with, and they might discover that they either intern in a different population and learn that they Actually like it even more or that the internship doesn't set your entire career. There's still opportunity to move and grow and change. So I just want to put that out there because I think that is a common misconception for students sometimes.
Carrie:Yeah, probably in a lot of fields, right? They're looking for an internship that kind of fits the details of what they want long term.
Jennifer:Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I worked in long term pediatrics. Like I said, I worked primarily with Children who were ventilated for life. Many of them were in low awareness states and so I did a lot of entrainment work working with their vital rhythms of their body and connecting with them through that and then responding to any change that they might have, whether that be a deeper breath, a sigh, a movement of a finger, of a hand, and seeing if those responses could be replicated. And if they could, then we could move into some reciprocal play where maybe I could have an adapted instrument that they could access and we could make music together. Wow. Then that would grow into either communication or smiles or opportunities for family members to see them, their loved one, this child in their life. Interacting and, be able to respond to each other. That work was incredibly meaningful for me and powerful for me. And I just adored it. But I needed to move home to be closer to family. And so I left a job that I loved and people that I just loved, and came to Texas and worked in an acute care hospital, where I started to learn about neonatal intensive care and worked a little more alongside child life specialists. And grew some of my practice of learning to do more procedural support with children who were. More cognitive, that were speaking with me, that were interacting with me on a different level. But the babies, the babies, I was able to work with them because I had years of experience in communicating with nonverbal people and that's what they do. And so it was kind of similar work in a lot of ways in that it was a lot of bonding. Moms and dads who were fearful of interacting with their fragile baby, right? They looked so fragile and small and were in an incubator or on oxygen or all the tubes and lines and things. This isn't what they were expecting and they didn't know how to interact. And yet we know that that bonding is so important for development and healing and so a lot of that work became bonding. But that entrainment practice that I talked about, like paying attention to physiologic rhythms, became matching rhythmically with infants while they were feeding so that they had longer bursts of the suck/swallow/breathe pattern, and then taking special training. In addition to the degree based trainings in the field, there are certificate trainings and advanced trainings that you can take. One of them being neonatal intensive care, One of them being breath rhythms lullabies. So both of those are specific to NICU infants. One is a very quantitatively measured physiologic responses. How do we get these babies to neurologically mature? How do we get these babies to feed better? Utilizing music to prime the brain and the body for this type of developmental recovery. And the other, leaning into bonding and family, songs of kin, importance of bringing this in. That also incorporates some of the entrainment and, the homeostasis requirements of an infant, that can be achieved in the music physiologically. So that work, felt like it was most at home, but I was getting to use a lot of that training in verbal processing and more psycho emotional care with the children who were experiencing trauma. So I was doing a mixture of things. Speaking of feeling like a generalist, even though I was working in I. C. U. S. Primarily, sometimes I was working on rehab, but in one room I would go in and we would be working on trunk control and sitting at the edge of bed and being able to sit up and reach for the instruments so that we were gaining strength to move toward rehabilitation, or to combat pneumonias and these things or brain injury. And so we're working on cognitive exercises to prime the brain for cognitive recovery. And then I would walk into the next room, and it would be, you know, a child who has lost a limb. And it would really be about processing the emotional grieving of losing that limb. So the work did become varied, right? It wasn't the same population. It was in the ICU, but it wasn't the same population in every bed. So vastly different that I was pulling from all sorts of educational experiences that I had had as well as those that I was seeking out. So some of these certificates and advanced training weekends, I would utilize to learn more about the particular population I was working with at the moment. I will say one of the things I didn't mention with the certification earlier that's important for students to know is that you also have to complete 100 hours of continuing education every five years to be re certified. So you can't lose your certification once you've achieved it if you don't maintain your continuing education or retake the exam every five years. There's an annual certification fee that you pay to the Certification Board for Music Therapists.
Carrie:When you're in a hospital and you're talking about going between different types of patients in different areas, can you be requested by a patient? Do you have to be, prescribed, so to speak, by a doctor to do this? And then, To kind of piggyback on that, I guess, is part of your work as a music therapist, educating doctors about how you can help their patients? After you've described a lot of this, I would assume that there are some doctors who are regularly advocating for music therapy as part of their patients healing and some who just are perhaps not familiar with it or, just may not be educated in it. So is that kind of part of your mission in a hospital, as a music therapist, is to also help educate the doctors?
Jennifer:Oh, I think that's part of the mission as a music therapist, everywhere. We are a young profession as professions go. We're always advocating, always educating, always being asked, what is music therapy? It's almost a joke that that's the most common question that you're going to get, walking around with your guitar or whatever it might be is what is music therapy or the assumption people assuming that they know what music therapy is, or even saying, you know, Oh yeah, I do music therapy all the time. I put on my favorite album, and I just feel so much better. Right, right. Which is therapeutic, but not and so definitely advocating and educating are, um, a big part of every music therapist's work, wherever they work, whether it's medical or not. In different settings, and in different facilities, the way that you build your census may look different in a lot of medical facilities. There is a referral process. And so nurses, physicians, whoever on the team might make a referral for music therapy and put it in the chart. Some hospitals require physicians order. Some do not. It just kind of depends. Some of it's unit based. Some units require physician's order and some units say, No, it's okay. As long as you get a a verbal order or a verbal referral you can go in. Or consult. There's not a like across the board system. Now, if you are working within a system, that's utilizing reimbursement for services, which is not always possible and you may not get enough money for it to be the way that the facility decides to employ music therapy. But if you are utilizing reimbursement, then a physician's order is required. So that also plays a role in how things work in different hospitals and spaces.
Carrie:Generally speaking, are music therapists working kind of a normal like daytime hours Monday through Friday type of job and a lot of places? Like are there instances where you'd be called into like an emergency kind of situation or you'd be there overnight for some reason? Or is it mostly kind of a regular working hours type of deal?
Jennifer:Most music therapists that I know have a pretty typical schedule, meaning that it's scheduled out and they know what it is. Now, it may not always be daytime hours. It might be that they work, two evening shifts a week, or they work a weekend a month or whatever it might be, or one weekend day a week. Again, it depends on the population and the facility. If it's in healthcare, those are 24, seven institutions. People have to be there all the time. You're not going to be providing music therapy in the middle of the night, usually. So I don't think I don't know anyone who has a regular job in the middle of the night. But I will say there are where you could be an on call type person. So an end of life hospice care. I know that there could be, on call music therapy where you're covering for the weekend. If any patients are actively dying and death is imminent and that family needs a session, you might be called in to do that. Music Therapy Assisted Childbirth is another area. Music Therapy Assisted Childbirth, you don't know when your patient is going to go into labor or how long that labor is going to last. It's a very different model of scheduling in that, it may be based on how many Mothers you have due in a particular timeframe so that you can be available for them, right? You know, I will say at the institution I work at now there are opportunities for staff to call in a stat music therapy referral and some of those are end of life. End of life is one reason why we get some stat music therapy. But it could also be an agitated patient, a patient who is confused or frustrated in some way. Usually they're confused or have a psychological need and are having a behavioral outburst that could benefit from a music related intervention, such as meeting the patient where they are musically and maybe in a fast paced, chord structure, but has some tension in it. And then changing the music over the course of a couple of minutes to see if the patient's body can follow you and calm down and get to a space where you can start to engage with them and Reach a level of communication to bring them out of their agitated state. That is something that we get calls for sometimes in the hospital as well.
Carrie:Wow. You mentioned that you have to keep up continuing education for your licensure. Can you talk a little bit about what those types of things look like? Are those things that you're doing online? Are they attending conferences? Are they going to actual courses? What are some of those that you've experienced and what types of things would students expect from those?
Jennifer:Yeah, there's a variety of ways that professionals can get their continuing education credits. It can be attending pre approved courses that are being offered by music therapists, and those courses could be online or in person. It could be going to conferences. It could be presenting at conferences. You can get credits when you publish research, when you publish an article or a book chapter. You can get credits when you host an intern or practicum student. You can get credits for teaching a college level course in music therapy or music therapy adjacent. You can get credits for going to in services within your facility that are related to your role and, the work that you do. There are a wide variety of ways that you can get the continuing education credits. There are courses that you can sign up for and take online. Within that 100 credits, you are required to fulfill, three hours of ethics each year as well. So that's another thing to be on the hunt for looking for ethics specific courses. In the hospital, there's always bioethics rounds. There's rounds that you can attend in services that you can attend. But there are also music therapists out there that are brilliant and putting together incredible resources and learning opportunities for therapists in every area.
Carrie:So for students who may be in high school or may be an undergrad in a program that is not specifically music therapy, are there some things you would advise them them to do in preparation for this? For instance, is learning guitar something that you would advise or are there some things that you would advise students to do, as they're looking for music therapy programs, you know, before they're actually starting in one that would help them once they get there?
Jennifer:Sure. So, in music therapy, we primarily are using voice, guitar, piano, and percussion. That's kind of the go to grouping of instruments. There may be an opportunity to use another instrument in a session, but it's not as frequent. Certainly that's going to be a large part of the learning in the degree plan, especially at the bachelor's level. And so If you already have some experience in those instruments, it can be helpful for sure. It also can be helpful to look at taking courses in high school, even, If you have the opportunity, courses that would help you understand if you like studying the human body and the human experience, because that's going to be a large part of what you're doing as well. Right. So I think those could be valuable as well. As much as we were talking about musicianship and being a solid musician and there is a good bit of understanding that needs to happen in terms of theory and genre specific music making. So what rhythms fit each genre so that even if you don't know how to play the song that your patient requests, you know how to play the genre well enough that you can get through it in an aesthetically pleasing way with them. And you can pull the essence of the song into the session. So I would say encouraging people to explore their musicianship in a variety of genres, not just classical, really looking at. You know, can I play country songs and pop songs and how do I rap and what does it look like to explore Eastern music and African beats and really having a worldview of music because you're going to meet people from all cultures and all races. This variety of People that you're going to be interacting with their music is going to connect for them in different ways and being open to that and being able to listen to what they have to say about it and being respectful in that is vital to the therapeutic relationship so that you can meet them where they are and serve them in that space.
Carrie:Yeah. What has been the most rewarding thing for you about your career?
Jennifer:You know, we haven't talked about some of the more recent parts of my career. I Got to do some guest lecturing, after grad school and different things like that. I was able to do some guest lecturing at universities. And more recently, I've had the opportunity to develop curriculum and offer intro to music therapy class, and connect that side of music therapy and educating and teaching and helping to build the passion for the field has been really unique and cool for me. In addition to that, I've recently had more and more opportunity to collaborate on research and, development of protocols and techniques and being able to pull in this array of research about different populations and different people, with ways that people are doing things or ways that people understand things and put it together and study it with the population that I have access to in order to really grow the knowledge base of the field. Feels big to me. It feels really cool. And exciting to be at a point where there's more opportunity to have this impact on the profession as it grows and continues. And just being able to hopefully be a part of that has been really, really cool. Really exciting. I don't know if that's because it's what I'm in right now, or if that's because it's, the answering your question as like some of the most impactful parts of my career, but it certainly stands out as something unique and like I said, exciting.
Carrie:Yeah. So we mentioned earlier that you are a manager of creative arts therapies at a hospital. So when I said that at the beginning, there were probably some people You know, heard that and thought, well, what does that mean? So can you go ahead and explain that to us and let us know the type of work you're doing in that role? Because we live in such a major city with a huge medical center. I'm not sure how common that is on a national scale, but I'm sure you have a lot of unique opportunity in that type of position that perhaps a lot of other people in your field don't have.
Jennifer:Sure. So, What that means is that I have the joy of serving a group of creative arts therapists, music and art therapists at a major hospital. We have 18 therapists on our staff that see patients throughout an eight hospital system, and I provide for them clinical supervision, program development, supervision and insight. I have the joy of hiring new music therapists when we have positions open, and providing for those therapists so that they can do the work that is meaningful to them. And that brings the best practices to our patients. Whether that be making sure that we have the right instruments and that they're in the right place or that protocols are in place to make sure that they're, able to do the work that they need to do. All the way to protecting their time and their practice and saying, no, we don't do that type of work, but here's how you can find someone else in the hospital that might be able to help you. That's what I get to do. And it's a really special. Yeah. place of service to my colleagues in the field.
Carrie:If you were speaking to students And they were to ask you, well, why should I consider becoming a music therapist? What is it about this field that you would want to tell students, is a compelling reason or a meaningful reason as to why they should consider this for an education and career path?
Jennifer:Yeah. You know, I've had some students contact me of recent, asking about the field. And one of the things that I tell them is that it's a passion filled service career. The opportunities and interactions that you create within it will serve you, they'll bring you, joy, honor, connection. And that it won't necessarily be an easy path. Part of the not easy path is what makes it so magical when it all comes together and happens the way it's meant to, so that the person you're working with discovers something new about themselves and improves their life in a way that has opportunities for change and growth for that person for the rest of their life.
Carrie:For anyone listening who as a patient in the future could benefit from music therapy, like types of situations that you've seen people in or types of situations where as a patient, you could request music therapy, or you could request it for your family member that you've really seen as maybe like a common situation that people aren't aware that music therapy could really benefit them or their family member?
Jennifer:We haven't mentioned, and I think these are probably more common, but there seems to be more publicity around music therapy with Alzheimer's or dementia. There's been some interest in the media about music therapy and autism. So these are areas that people might know about. But when I think about the best people served by music therapy, it's the people who you've already tried the standard approaches and they're not quite hitting the mark. The person isn't getting to the level that you thought they would, or they've made great progress and now they've plateaued, and there's still progress to be made. Those are people in whatever diagnosis, whatever, concern or issue they're struggling with, those are people that might benefit from music therapy that need a different perspective or a different approach to reach their greatest potential.
Carrie:So looking back over the course of your career, both as a student in this field and as a practicing music therapist, and now also as someone who is helping to train and hire and support music therapists, what is some advice that you have for students that perhaps was given to you along the way that you felt has really helped you within your career path, or perhaps some advice that you regularly give to students as an instructor that you feel like is important for students to know, who are interested in this field.
Jennifer:Hmm. I think that in general, a piece of advice that I give myself and others, and that is given to me is that, whatever it is that's happening right now, isn't going to be the same forever. So whether that's good or bad, take that. And use it to grow if it's bad, recognize that it's not going to last forever. We're going to move through it and learn to compensate for it or overcome it or whatever path it's going to lead us on is going to be an opportunity for growth. If it's something that's good that's happening right now, hold it tight. Tuck it away somewhere. That's something that you'll want to hold on to and keep with you for future times when things aren't so great.
Carrie:Yeah, absolutely Well, Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your journey with us. This is a field that I think a lot of people have heard of perhaps, but maybe haven't encountered in their lives, right? Or maybe haven't actually talked to somebody who practices music therapy. So I really appreciate you giving us such a detailed glimpse into your career and talking about all of these different things for students to consider and think about if they're interested in this area.
Jennifer:Absolutely. It was a pleasure to speak with you today. I will say If people are interested in learning more, they can go to musictherapy. org, which is the American Music Therapy Association's website and get information there. They can also go to cbmt. org, which is the certification board for music therapists, to see a little bit more about that process and some of the domains of practice.
Carrie:Great. I will absolutely put those in the show notes. Thank you so much.
Do you know someone I should interview? Please DM me on Instagram@pathsinprogresspodcast and let me know who I should talk to. I would love to hear about how these stories are impacting your journey. Please follow Paths in Progress wherever you download your podcasts and leave a review to let me know what you think. You can also follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn at Paths in Progress Podcast. Our music is by John Grimmett and the artwork is by Edgar Alanis. Thanks again for joining me today.