A blog post from SOLES Ambassador and MA in Counseling with specialization in Clinical Mental Health Counseling Maggie Wilhelm:

This winter break I traveled home to Cincinnati to visit family and enjoy the holidays. While this break was meant to be entirely pleasurable (eat, drink, be merry, and do NO school work 😉) I realized that this (therapy) world is a very small place. While home, a place where I’m pretty sure I know no one in my field,  I randomly met three people in my perspective career. One of these unexpected encounters occurred at a grade school friend’s bridal shower. I walked in knowing two people in a group of thirty but started making casual conversation with the girls around me. It turns out, one of the women is a licensed LPCC and was giving me all kinds of pointers for where to work and how to connect when I move back to Cincinnati. What an awesome surprise!
A few days later on my flight back to San Diego, I started chatting with the people around me on the plane. It turns out, one girl was doing my program in Boulder, Colorado, and another had just graduated from undergrad and was considering her options for grad school. Two of us offered whatever advice we could to the newbie, and we all shared stories about how much we loved the field, what type of practicums we’re doing, our hopes for our future careers, and our specialty populations. (Meanwhile the poor man in the middle of us was such a good sport, he even pretended to be interested in therapy talk. Haha!)