August in Florida has no interest in the academic calendar. Recently, I strolled through my local HomeGoods store, which was filled with orange and brown hues of all things autumn. Meanwhile, it was a steamy ninety-four degrees outside and the afternoon summer thunderstorm had just come and gone. We start the fall semester anyway, entering a season that will not truly arrive here until Thanksgiving.

I find that an oddly fitting metaphor for the counseling profession. Counselors are forever starting before conditions are ideal. You take your first client before you feel ready. You sit for the CPCE while a hundred other things are due. You walk into a practicum site where the work is already underway and the staff has been at it for years. Nobody waits for the weather to break.

What makes the work we do possible is not just readiness. It is community. It is your peer who texts you the night before your first session, the site supervisor who tells you they made the same mistake before, or the faculty member who has seen this particular flavor of doubt many times before and is not alarmed by it. That is the season we are actually beginning.

There is a particular sound a building makes when a semester starts. The hallways and common areas outside the classrooms fill up twenty minutes early, and it is never quiet. People are catching up about internships, summer jobs, or somebody's new apartment, and nobody is in any hurry to sit down. There is something comforting and energizing about the buzz on campus.

What strikes me about this issue is how many of the voices in it belong to people who already know that sound. Lauren Williams earned her master's here in 2014 and now supervises our students at the VA. Nicole King regularly returns to teach with us, and last semester she presented at a regional symposium on caregiver stress. Areesha Qureshi graduated and has stayed on a research team. None of them had to come back. They did anyway.

That says something about what we are building in this department. A counseling program hands you a degree, but what it gives you, if it works, is a set of people you keep returning to, whether that be for supervision, for a second opinion, for networking, or perhaps for the reassurance that the hard case you are carrying is a hard case for everybody.

This issue of The Listening Hat celebrates exactly that. From research to community engagement, from familiar faces to new ones, this issue is a portrait of a department that keeps showing up for one another. You will also meet new colleagues: welcome to Drs. Timothy Eng and Joshua Stanley!

The weather will catch up with the calendar eventually. Until then, we start anyway, and we start together.

W. Bradley McKibben
Chair, Department of Counselor Education

For Anthony Williams, the path to counseling has been shaped by lived experience and a lasting curiosity about what helps people heal.

As a person in long-term recovery, Williams experienced firsthand how transformative unconditional support and connection can be, an experience that sparked his interest in understanding how counseling helps people recover. At Stetson, that curiosity has grown into a research interest in LGBTQ+ mental health and in addiction and recovery.

Some of the most meaningful parts of his time in the program, he says, have been the relationships he has built with peers and faculty, who have challenged him to grow into a more reflective and humble practitioner. "It's always a joy getting to campus early, sitting outside the classroom and catching up with my peers before class," he said. "I've never felt so excited or connected in another academic program, and it's truly the people who have made Stetson my happy place."

In January, Williams begins his practicum with the Orlando VA, where he will continue developing as a clinician while serving veterans in an interdisciplinary health care environment. Looking ahead, he hopes to build a career in which clinical practice and research inform one another, using both to improve care for historically marginalized communities, particularly LGBTQ+ individuals and people navigating addiction and recovery.

His advice for new students is to resist the pressure of having a fully formed plan. "It's okay to not have it all figured out," he said. "Give yourself permission not to know yet and pay attention to what excites you along the way. The answers have a way of becoming clearer as we trust the process and grow into the counselors we're meant to be."

Outside of class, community keeps him grounded. He stays active in his 12-step recovery communities and gives back to a community that has given him a great deal. He also works as a leader at Walt Disney World, where supporting people from different backgrounds continues to shape how he thinks about leadership and belonging. When he is not working or studying, he is happiest at the beach, listening to a favorite podcast, catching a movie or sharing dinner or coffee with friends.

Dr. Timothy Eng's path through the counseling profession has taken him from residential treatment facilities to first-generation college students to a university in Slovakia, and, more recently, to a classroom at Stetson University.

Eng is an Assistant Professor in Stetson's Department of Counselor Education, where he teaches a range of courses across the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program. He earned his master's degree in College Student Personnel Counseling at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania before moving to Orlando to pursue a doctorate in Counselor Education and Supervision at the University of Central Florida.

His career began in clinical work in residential and addiction settings. He later moved into higher education,

where he focused on supporting students in federal TRIO programs. As a Fulbright Specialist, he traveled to Trnava University in Slovakia to help develop a university-based counseling training center within what was then the country's first and only counseling program.

What inspires him most about teaching and mentoring, he says, is watching students become resilient, capable people. Uncertainty and self-doubt surface for nearly everyone at some point in the program, and the reward is seeing students step more confidently into their professional identity and connect their own experiences with new material.

His current scholarship includes a collaborative study on self-love as a construct in counselor education, which examined counseling students' experiences completing an eight-week self-love intervention during practicum. He is also interested in developing global service learning as a research area within counselor education programs.

Outside his professional work, colleagues and students might be surprised to learn Eng enjoys mixed martial arts and has built Muay Thai and jiu-jitsu as hobbies in his own wellness plan. He is also proudly from Providence, Rhode Island, and often jokes that he and Aaron Beck were born in the same hospital.

Two quotations guide his work. The first is a line he has carried for years without being certain of its origin: "Without compassion, there can be no everlasting change." To him, it captures the essence of what it means to be a counselor.

The second came from a professional mixed martial artist interviewed after losing a championship match: "When times are good be grateful, and when times [are tough] be graceful." Eng says it speaks to something he believes about adversity: that people retain the ability to be intentional about how they carry themselves through it.

Visit Dr. Eng's faculty profile »

Lauren Williams supervises Stetson counseling students from a position she once occupied herself. Williams earned her Master of Science in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Stetson in 2014, following a bachelor's degree in Psychology from East Stroudsburg University.

She started working in mental health several years before that, in 2007, mentoring troubled youth and their families while working her way through school. Her career since has spanned domestic violence shelters, residential substance use rehabilitation, school-based counseling, and inpatient crisis stabilization, including work as an emergency evaluator and recovery specialist.

During her time at Stetson, she completed a counseling internship with the Harbor House of Central Florida and traveled to Germany on a graduate study abroad trip, visiting Department of Defense schools, military bases and psychiatric hospitals to learn how mental health care is delivered in Europe. While there, she presented at a professional conference on the benefits of transcendental meditation for adolescents.

Williams joined the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2018 as a licensed mental health counselor in the Behavioral Health Interdisciplinary Program, where she specializes in anxiety and insomnia-related disorders in an outpatient setting. She is a certified provider of both Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia and the Unified Protocol, co-facilitates a weekly Unified Protocol anxiety group and previously served as a team lead for one of the program's clinical care teams. In 2023, she was named counseling training director.

Her connection to the department has run in both directions. In spring 2022, she returned to Stetson as an adjunct instructor, teaching individual, marital, and family psychopathology to master's-level students.

Today, she supervises counseling interns at the VA, including students from Stetson’s counseling programs. What she enjoys most about supervising Stetson counseling students is the vantage point it gives her. She describes the appeal as watching students begin to develop their skills and move through the first clinical experiences that will shape the rest of their careers.

Asked what makes a strong intern or beginning counselor, Williams points to warmth and empathy, a desire to gain insight and remain open to self-discovery, and a willingness to seek guidance and support as needed.

For new supervisors, or for clinicians weighing whether to host an intern, her guidance is to plan for the learning curve rather than around it. "Expect mistakes, practice grace and utilize moments to connect with your intern on both a personal and professional level in order for your teaching moments to become memorable," she said.

Tips for Starting a New Semester

New semesters come with all new challenges, and sometimes it is hard to start the new semester off on the right foot. All of the unknowns and newness can bring anxiety. One thing that really helps with new semester anxiety is left-brain activities. If you find yourself struggling with new semester anxiety, deep dive into a left brain activity. Organize some binders, color code your calendar, get all the gel pens and fill in your planner. These activities will help your mind shift from the unknowns to what is concretely in front of you. Once you're able to do that, you'll realize you have all the tools you need to navigate this new semester!

- Dr. Brooke Bugni

As the newest faculty member, I'm right there with you navigating the excitement and nervous energy that comes with starting fresh! One of the best ways to ground yourself when stepping into something new, whether it's your first course, a new set of clinical skills, or working with a new client in practicum or internship, is to intentionally build your community from day one. You don't have to carry the weight of something new alone! Reach out to a peer to share different perspectives, find a classmate to practice new skills, consult with a fellow counselor-in-training, or stop by faculty office hours just to introduce yourself. Surrounding yourself with others who share your passion for this work turns those initial "newbie" anxieties into new relationships on which you can build your confidence. Remember, we are all in this together, and you belong here!

- Dr. Joshua Stanley

For Areesha Qureshi, counseling has become a place where creativity, connection, and curiosity meet.

Qureshi is a registered mental health counselor intern at The Meaningful Life Center, where she works with children, adolescents, and adults on concerns including anxiety, depression, OCD, relationship challenges, emotional regulation, life transitions, and neurodiversity. Her integrative approach draws on cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, expressive arts, internal family systems, and play therapy.

She is also part of a Stetson research team conducting a metasynthesis of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFCT) research, assisting across the stages of the project. She describes the qualitative coding process as a particular highlight, offering a closer look at how a metasynthesis comes together while deepening her understanding of EFCT itself. "The approaches and interventions we use with clients are strengthened by the research behind them," she said, adding that the project lets her connect her clinical work with a longstanding interest in research.

Looking back, Qureshi credits the program with shaping both her career path and her identity as a counselor. Coursework, supervision, practicum and internship, and relationships with professors and classmates pushed her past technique alone and toward a fuller sense of who she is in the therapeutic relationship. Professional identity, she says, is an ongoing process rather than something conferred at graduation. "Stetson gave me a strong foundation while also teaching me to remain curious," she said. "Stetson helped me see that my career does not have to fit into only one box."

What she enjoys most about the work is the room it leaves for creativity, especially with children, where counseling might mean playing a game, drawing, or finding an entirely different way to help a client feel comfortable opening up. She recalls one child who initially did not want to be in counseling at all. Building the relationship took time, creativity, and patience. Eventually, that same client told her, "I am excited to see you next week." The moment stayed with her as a reminder that the relationship itself is often where the work begins.

One of her most meaningful experiences at Stetson came through the Brain Fitness Academy Care Partner Support Group, which she co-led alongside Adjunct Professor Nicole King. What stayed with her was the resilience of the care partners who showed up week after week for the people they loved, and the way group members supported one another through both difficult and joyful moments. As someone who did not grow up in the United States, she says her time at Stetson was also about finding community: the friendships, the faculty relationships, and experiences like the support group that made the university more than the place she earned a degree.

Her advice to current students and recent graduates is to ease up on the timeline. "Give yourself permission to still be learning," she said. "Ask questions, use your supervision, take trainings in things that genuinely interest you, and stay curious." She also cautions against measuring progress against someone else's. Every counselor develops differently, she says, and every client has something new to teach.

Learn more about the EFCT research project »

We love hearing from our alumni and celebrating your continued impact in the counseling profession. Our alumni webpage provides multiple ways for you to stay connected to Stetson and to our department, specifically!