Elena Yee

In the summer of 2013 I traveled to New Orleans to participate in the annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE). It’s a conference that I often attended when I was working in college student affairs for diversity and social justice.

When it comes to religion and spirituality, counselors seem to get a bit apprehensive about addressing its utility when working with clients. Whether it’s a client who wants to talk about the role of prayer in his or her treatment plan or a counselor who is a person of faith and wants to frame a presenting problem through that lens, it seems as though we’d prefer to put it on the backburner and pretend it doesn’t matter or at least that it doesn’t or shouldn’t matter all that much.

Diversity comes in many forms and though I have been focused on race, there other aspects of diversity that are just as salient to me. One has been my age and returning to graduate school at 51 years old. This was apparent to me in small ways one of which was in my ethics class and learning about the abuse of the elderly.

Being the only person of color in a classroom is nothing new to me. This was the case when I was studying as an undergrad to be an engineer back in the 1980s and when I went to graduate school for a degree in intercultural studies in the late 1990s. In the workplace I was typically the lone person of color whether on the manufacturing floor, in a meeting discussing student support services or teaching English overseas.

Having worked as a director for diversity efforts in higher education, I knew that choosing a graduate program in clinical mental health counseling was contingent on its commitment to cultural competence (i.e. privilege, power, bias and discrimination) and diversity in the coursework, training and faculty. For my studies, I want to focus on race, sexual orientation and the intersection of identities that often marginalize people in US American society.