As I think about our faculty and students and about all they have accomplished during the last year, I feel a great deal of pride.
We continue to refine and update our curriculum to meet needs of students in a changing mental health environment and in an increasingly competitive job market. We continue to receive external funding for various projects, including Nancy O’Conner’s Home Based Family Therapy and Smart Start projects. We are able to provide research assistantships to many of our students through these funded projects.
I know we are making a difference in the lives of families we see here at the Family Center and also in the lives of those our alumni are seeing. The faculty and students are conducting research that also has the potential to make a difference in people’s lives. We are surrounded by a warm and caring community in the MFT program, our school, our college and in Manhattan! What a great place to be!
We are working on our self-study for re-accreditation by the Commission on Accreditation for Family Therapy Education. This is an important opportunity for us to review where we are and where we want to be. If you are contacted and asked to provide input on your experiences at K-State or asked to help us contact your employer, we would really appreciate your help!
We truly value community and would love to hear from you. We’d like to include a section on current placements and the accomplishments of our alumni in our next newsletter. Let us know about new jobs, new babies, new marriages, etc. so we can share them with our community!
I continue to love the work I do. Three of my doctoral students – Adriatik Likani, Kyle Horst and Marcos Mendez – defended their dissertations this year. My colleague from Virginia Tech, Eric McCollum, and I presented a series of webinars on couples treatment for domestic violence for Calgary Counseling Center. That was a new experience for me and a fun way to deliver information without traveling. I was invited to present at the Canadian Domestic Violence Conference and spent two days in Toronto providing a workshop on couples treatment for domestic violence. This summer I was on a panel examining the state of family therapy research for the AAMFT research conference in Washington, DC. I presented with students at NCFR, AAMFT, and AFTA during the past year and was honored to be named a Fellow at NCFR. I continue to do exciting work funded by the USAF to have a number of excellent graduate students working with me on USAF-funded projects. I am excited to be completing a project to develop a risk assessment tool to be used by family violence professionals throughout Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
On the personal side, I continue to love being at K-State and living in Manhattan! I have enjoyed spending time with my son and his wife and their 2 children from Boulder and my daughter and her husband and their 4 children from Broken Arrow, OK. Gary and I spent some time in St. Thomas and enjoy going to shows at McCain auditorium and watching K-State football and baseball. Last year we traveled with friends to the Fiesta Bowl in Phoenix, to Santa Fe for spring break, and I traveled with Manhattan women friends to Austin Memorial weekend. Personally life is great!
Let us hear from you!
