The Counseling Care Center hosted an event entitled "The Happiness Challenge" for International Boost Your Self-Esteem Day in the Ornelas Student Center. The event was open to students, faculty, and staff. The objective of the event was to express thoughts and feelings, de-stress from daily activities, and develop coping skills to maintain happiness.
"Our program is structured on an expertise development model, which facilitates acquisition of higher-order knowledge, clinical skills, and professional identity."
Following the university’s commitment, the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program prepares competent community counselors using approaches that include the integration of faith and counseling principles. We train students knowing that counselor preparation is more than just developing clinical expertise because it is also about developing the ability to synthesize a myriad of information into a composite of knowledge for making effective clinical judgment to help improve the quality of lives within our communities and schools.
Our program is structured on an expertise development model, which facilitates acquisition of higher-order knowledge, clinical skills, and professional identity. Additionally, our curriculum contains additive learning, which is central to the process of developing clinical competence. Thus, the semester courses are structured based on the level of difficulty. Students take less difficult courses in the first semester, followed by courses with a medium level of difficulty in the second semester, increasing in the third semester, and so on. Therefore, each stage is refined, reinforced, and synthesized into courses in the subsequent stages.
In addition, the program’s curriculum corresponds with the curriculum for counselor preparation approved by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP). Our curriculum also meets the academic requirements of licensing agencies in the states of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. The curriculum for the clinical mental health counseling is 60 credit hours. Forty percent of courses are offered online while the rest are offered in an online synchronous format (with an on-campus option in Marshall or Tyler). Our class size is very small, allowing for productive interactions between students and faculty. Additionally, it allows students better access to faculty to receive exhaustive feedback to enhance their learning experiences.
