Field Period Experience Helps Keuka College Student Find Her Calling, One Young Life at a Time

Psychology major Cecelia Furbeck is clear-eyed about her career aspirations.

“My goal is to help as many kids as I possibly can,” said the junior, known to friends as Cece.

She got a big head start during her most recent Field Period® experience, helping counsel middle and high school students at the Camden Life Center in her Cayuga County, N.Y., hometown. The facility provides a variety of resources for at-risk adolescents and adults facing challenges including food insecurity and substance abuse.

Working with the Center’s youth engagement coordinator, Cece served anywhere from five to as many as a dozen young clients a day.

“We had an open-door program,” said Cece, whose major includes a Clinical/Counseling pathway. “It’s set up to be a safe place for them to all connect with each other and connect with us.”

Cece and the staff oversaw a variety of services including recreational activities, athletics, crafts, free meals, and counseling.

“She was very impressive, especially for someone so young,” said Camden Life Center Director Jessica Perusse, who noted that most of the facility’s interns are master’s students. “And she was serving her own community, which is a wonderful experience but brings up challenges. We were all impressed with her ability to balance an understanding of the importance of confidentiality with the joy you get from serving your community.”

Cece, second from right, poses with Camden Life Center colleagues at a gala fundraiser the facility held in August.

Among other duties, Cece put together a community-wide calendar of events and organized a weeklong Adulting 101 course for youths that included real-life lessons in areas such as banking, automotive maintenance, and cooking.

Coupled with counseling, the varied programming models new opportunities for at-risk youth, Cece said.

“It gives them a chance to make a transition,” she said.

Cece said the experience taught her some of the finer points of counseling.

“A big thing I took away is, it’s not so much what you do that helps people, but how you do it,” she said. “Because if you walk into a resource center and someone looks like they don’t want to help you, you’re not going to want the help anymore. But if you have someone look at you and say, ‘I believe that we can do this; you brought yourself here and that was the first big step,’ and you can tell they’re in the deep end wanting to swim with you, you are going to want that help.”

That attitude contributed to Cece being hired at the Center after her Field Period hours were complete.

“She had done a really great job working with peer supporters who run the youth program,” said Perusse. “So we took her on as part-time employee.”

Cece’s desire to help others is deep-rooted. The youngest of six children, she watched helplessly as a pair of older siblings battled substance abuse and mental illness without the help they needed.

“I constantly found myself thinking that if somebody saw them as more than just an at-risk youth or a substance user – if someone saw underneath that to what they were actually facing – they might have had different outcomes,” she said. “So I thought, I might not be able to reach them, but I could help kids who are like them and prevent this from happening to other families.”

When it comes to treating at-risk youth, CeCe believes, the earlier, the better.

“My personal philosophy is, if you can build a great foundation during childhood, no matter what they go through in adulthood, they can always come back to that,” she said. “If you can get those youth to places like the Life Center, with social workers or counselors, where they can get the help that they need, then they are able to build that foundation. And from there, they might not be at risk later on.”

CeCe was so taken with the possibilities of early treatment, she has adjusted her career focus.

“I was going to be a child psychologist. That was my long-term goal. But after working with the Life Center, I really decided that social work is more the path for me.”

— Cecelia Furbeck