Finish up one thing, start up another

I have my first week's worth of work completed. Actually as of 9:59pm last night, my final posting for the week was done and I was able to call it a week.

However, that being said, I'm not totally slacking off today. This week, in addition to my homework, I have turned my attention a slightly different direction. CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education. For any of you readers that are fellow students, you know what I'm talking about. If you are unfamiliar, it is a pretty healthy program that each of us must go through during the course of our seminary education.

The typical student, or perhaps I should say the traditional student, or more so the full time-on campus student, will usually do this program during their first summer break due to the large amount of time required for the program. CPE requires 400 hours...uff-da. However, as DL students that are (for the most part) working full time in some form or another, we don't have the ability to drop everything and spend a summer doing the program.

There is a solution, the extended program. Longer time frame, easier schedule during the duration.

At this point, 2 years into my DL journey, a lot of my classmates have either already done CPE or in the process of doing it right now. I was slated to do it last fall. I was excepted into a program and all set for it. However, life got in the way and I ended up not doing it.

Now, fast forward a year. I'm facing the upcoming school year with a lot of things pointing me in the direction of needing to do CPE this year. I won't go into great detail here, but long story short, I'm planning on it for this fall.

This brings me to the application stage. I'm actually in the process of applying to the same program that I was going to do a year ago. Fortunately, this gives me a little bit of a leg up. I need to update the application and attached essay's to include the past year, but I don't need to completely rewrite them all. That saves me some time.

I will finish up that process today and send it off. My next step will be an interview at some point over the summer, and if all goes as expected, I'll start the program in late August or early September.