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Fall 1999

Alums at work
Making real-world psychology real in the world

This spring, U.S. News & World Report ranked the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities at the top of its list for counseling and personnel services programs. The ranking established in the public’s eye what many have known for quite some time: The College of Education and Human Development’s Counseling and Student Personnel Psychology (CSPP) program is remarkable.

Approved by the American Psychological Association since 1952, the program has roots that reach back into the 1930s, when the University first established a counseling center.

Today, it trains master’s and doctoral students to become counselors and psychologists with a combined approach of theoretical course work and real-world practice. Faculty, whose blend of academic, professional, and editorial leadership contributes to the program’s international presence, closely mentor the students through to completion.

John L. Romano, a professor of educational psychology, neatly sums CSPP up this way: “We have a dynamic, professionally involved, and caring faculty. And we attract excellent students. We try to attract students from diverse environments—different racial backgrounds, different countries, different ages. It makes for an excellent program.” 

“[Our] history and the current work being done by the faculty and students lead to the national recognition,” adds Professor Tom Skovholt, who for six years has coordinated the program. “We have really good students. Good students make a good program.”

In the paragraphs that follow, you will be introduced to four CSPP graduates. They share three characteristics: Each has earned a degree in CSPP, each calls the Twin Cities home, and each is making a professional—and personal—impact in others’ lives. 

Benita Powell

Ten years ago, Benita Powell flew from her native North Carolina to check out the Twin Cities. And she didn’t much like what she saw—which, oddly enough, convinced her that this is where she belonged. “I’ll never forget it, because it was rainy and cold,” she says. “Everything looked so gloomy and bad, I thought this would be the place for me. Starting bad, then it would just pick up.”

This explains a lot about Powell, a determined woman who has a way of making things better than they may at first seem. The counselor at Minneapolis’ Roosevelt High School starts every day with a smile on her face, “because,” she says, “I am blessed!” When a colleague feels glum, she reassures, “It’s going to be a gooood day, girlfriend.”

Her enthusiasm is real, not saccharin-sweet. And it is contagious. A simple excursion with Powell—a trip to the mall, even—turns into an event.

“Come to the Mall of America with me. That’ll show you how many kids know me,” she says. “That’s why I can’t go there anymore, not even for a movie. I’d be buying popcorn for everybody, driving them home.”

Moving to the chilly north was a difficult transition for Powell, 33. She credits students, faculty, and staff at the college for making her feel welcome. There, "people became like your family,” she says, explaining that professors offered her their home phone numbers along with their warm hospitality.

“I thought wine and cheese was a part of life up here,” she says. “Coming from a Pentecostal background to wine and cheese, I was all right.” (Still, she clarifies, juice is her poison of choice.)

Her experiences in CSPP prompted Powell, who graduated from Elizabeth City State University, to study alternative schools, a subject about which she has grown passionate. On her own time, she helps write proposals for people interested in starting alternative schools.

“I like to see my work come up as a school. It’s cool,” she says, tapping the table with cherry-painted fingernails. “You don’t get paid for it. You’re giving your heart to it.”

Powell has built a career in the Minneapolis Public School system that has been, not unpredictably, active. She works summer school. She stays for afterschool sessions. She builds coaching programs. She takes kids out to dinner at Old Country Buffet. She sings and directs, last year staging a production of the Underground Railroad. (“It was the bomb!” she says of the play’s success). She works 12 to 13 hours a day.

A solid churchgoer, Powell likes to hold the long notes singing gospel. That could be her professional credo, too. “Counseling isn’t just being in your office and having people come to you or just scheduling,” she says. That kind of counseling, she explains, is being “just a clerk.” Powell views her role more broadly—helping students succeed.

“I’m not a person to sit back,” she adds. “I’m making change.”

 Shepherd Myers

“How many kids does Shep have?” Janice Kalin, a former study-buddy of Shepherd Myers, asks with an excited yelp.

Clearly, the two are long overdue for a visit. Shep—“only my mother calls me Shepherd”—has two daughters, ages six and three. During a visit one recent night, they crawled all over him like Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquering Everest. At one point his youngest, Annika, stood on his lap and waved a postcard-sized American flag over his head, a look of triumph on her face.

Much has changed for Myers since he and Kalin (see profile on page 16) were CSPP doctoral students together.

Myers, who graduated from the program in 1994, has worked since 1991 as a staff psychologist and co-director of clinical training at Aspen Medical Group in St. Paul. There, the Chicago native specializes in medical psychology, treatment of anxiety disorders, assessment and treatment of adult attention deficit disorder, relationship counseling, and hypnosis. He also supervises doctoral students.

“That’s one thing that’s great about my job, variety,” he says. “It’s a great field—doing something useful, helping people. I like being in the trenches.”

Myers credits CSPP for helping him build and broaden his skills. “One thing about CSPP is the interest is very diverse,” he says. “They don’t pigeonhole you at all.”

His current workload is rigorous. When asked about his client roster, he lets out an “Oy!” explaining that 50 to 60 clients keep him busy. But their demands, he goes on to say, are no trouble compared to a greater pressure most clinicians now face: managed care.

Myers, 43, doesn’t hide his displeasure at the thickets routinely placed between counselor and client. “I hate it,” he says. “The oversight and the paperwork, it’s tough.” Indeed, he calls managed care his biggest challenge at work, though he tries not to bring it home with him.

“The politics sometimes get to me, but you leave work at work,” he says. “It’s about boundaries.”

A couple days a week, Myers sets out at dawn to bike along the Mississippi River. That’s his time. Otherwise, he’s spoken for. “Between work and family, that’s about it,” he says with a shrug and a laugh. 

Lavorial Salone

Lavorial Salone’s rich, unpredictable past has taken him far.

Reporting on a newfound love of travel, for instance, Salone says that, before last year, the only time he ever left the country was “during the war.” This, with a nod of great import.

Which war? Persian Gulf? No, he explains. The Vietnam War, where he was stationed in Thailand. His pierced ear and smooth, clean-shaven face put him not a minute over, say, 30. Then he confides his age: 51.

After his tour in the Air Force, Salone goes on to say, he toured again, this time as a singer with an elaborately costumed troupe. The honeyed-voice South Minneapolitan headlined a band called “Loves Distinction,” among others, and performed in hotels from Miami Beach into Canada. (He also worked as an accountant for a short time. “I hated accounting,” he admits.)

Today, Salone confines his solos to the church choir. Yet his multifaceted experience—and ability to blend in just about anywhere—has helped in his professional life. After a stint at Augsburg College, he now works as a student counselor and supervisor of practicum students at Metropolitan State University, which has a campus in St. Paul and another in Minneapolis.

“I always liked helping people,” Salone says, sitting in his Minneapolis office, which yields a panorama stretching from the Basilica of St. Mary to the Target Center. “I love helping people develop their skills and identify their strengths. I feel I bring a more practical approach. I’ve been told that’s helpful.”

The first in his family to go to college, he earned an undergraduate and master’s degree at the University of Colorado in Denver between the service and show business. In 1987, despite a strong desire not to endure another Midwestern winter, he returned to the Twin Cities to study counseling psychology.

“I thought I would be finished in three years. I thought, ‘I can handle three winters,’ ” he says. It didn’t happen that way, though. Once in school, his mother got sick; attending her illness prolonged his studies.

It would have been easy for Salone—his first name was suggested by a woman sitting next to his pregnant mother on a train—to feel isolated at the college. He was close to 40 when he started, making him a “nontraditional” student. But jobs within CSPP, along with emotional support from faculty and staff, “really helped me feel I was in the right place…like I was part of the program,” he says. He completed his doctorate in 1995.

Professionally, he sees his next move into student services, perhaps as a dean of student affairs.

“I have a lot to offer non-traditional students, because that’s where I came from,” he says. “I could bring something new to the area rather than status quo.” 

Janice Kalin

Three days a week, Janice Linden Kalin rides up to the 13th floor of a steel-and-glass skyscraper in downtown Minneapolis and finds herself surrounded by all the trappings—the office art, the staff and colleagues, the steady clientele—of the good corporate life.

She’s the first to show surprise over where she’s wound up.

“Going into the doctoral program [at the college], I didn’t know what I would become,” Kalin says, sitting at a round wood table in front of her office’s wide picture window. “I didn’t want to be a therapist, that I knew. But I was very open.”

That degree of openness has invited opportunities for Kalin, who earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota, a master’s in education and counseling psychology at the University of St. Thomas, and a Ph.D. in the CSPP program. For instance, when a potential employer once asked her, “Would you like to be an adjunct?” she affirmed right on the spot. “I said, ‘Sure! What’s an adjunct?’”

The part-time position grew into a career at MDA Consulting Group Inc.—a group of organizational psychologists who specialize in corporate hiring, team-building and organizational development—where Kalin, 48, has worked since 1992.

The practice dovetails especially well for the St. Paul native, who wrote her dissertation on the mid-career female MBA graduate. Completed in 1998—10 years after Kalin entered the CSPP program—her study drew its subjects from female graduates of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

“Women poured out their hearts at the open-ended question section,” she says, surprised at their candor along with a survey response rate of 60 percent. Complaints about office politics, lack of balance between home and work life, distaste for golf, and feelings of isolation especially struck her.

“The biggest thing I’ve learned is [that] being called a super woman is not a compliment,” she says.

In her own life, Kalin demurs that she is anything superlative. “I maintain” is the way she describes her approach to balancing work and family. But, as a mother of three daughters—now ages 13, 14, and 19—she at various times has juggled parenting, academics, and jobs, including a stint as a residential real estate agent.

At the college, Kalin says she took “one class at a time.” Her philosophy was plain. “You need to let some things go,” she explains. “I told myself it was okay not to always get an A.”

That her professors allowed her leeway on occasion helped Kalin keep her footing. “The professors got to know me and understood my situation,” she says. “They respect nontraditional students. [CSPP lets] you be what you want to be.”

The chaos has eased some, though not completely. With her eldest heading off to college and a Bat Mitzvah to plan for her youngest, Kalin now finds a degree of serenity in work. “Someone said, ‘Your office is so neat,’” she says, twisting the heart-shaped gold earring on her earlobe. “That’s because it’s my space. I get to finish sentences here, too.”

Moreover, Kalin has found a career where, as she says, “all the pieces fit together.” “I never thought that this would be what I would be doing, but I love what I’m doing,” she says. “We’re able to make real-world psychology real in the world.”

—Diane Richard