Student flies through practicum experience and contributes to marketing support group initiative | Clinton Haas

Captain's Log: Star date -309722.13, (actual star date) I am going on my eleventh week of being a student at the WSU Center for Community Support and Research, and I must say things are going great. I am currently finishing up a marketing plan for the Support Group Services Team, and it’s starting to feel like we are coming close to finishing the updating process for the 2,500 support groups in the database. Oh, I should probably describe a little about myself and why I am at CCSR in the first place.



Clinton Haas

It is now November in the year 2012; I am a college super senior (5th year) at WSU, one semester away from finishing my bachelor degree in Healthcare Management and Community Development (HMCD). To tell you the truth I am pretty jazzed! Eighteen years in school, and it is finally winding down. The beginning of the next chapter of my life is a semester away.

For this hands-on learning I heard a plethora of good recommendations for going to this place called Center for ehh… let’s just call it CCSR. (Later I learned to remember the whole name.) Here they have five pillars that branch over a wide array of health, leadership, and community assistance.  I chose to join the Support Group Services side and help with a database. Truth be told, I thought that this initiative sounded rather easy, and it would add some strength to my resume.

Little did I know that Angela, my preceptor, would have me running around with a constant list of groups I needed to research, various tasks for other staff, and even have me start a marketing plan! I was tickled pink to have the opportunity to really dive down deep and do work in which I could be a strong asset.

Through the development of the plan I was asked to help decide what type of merchandise CCSR should buy, i.e. pens, cups, and memo kits. To my dying day I will remember Joyce saying how she will only use a thin point pen and how she outright hates anything larger.

Well, here I am, with my marketing plan in the review process. Most of the groups are updated in the database minus a few stragglers and, here I am feeling like this semester has been one of the bigger learning opportunities that WSU could give me.


At a recent conference, Clinton shares information about

support groups with participants.

The relationships that I have developed here, the learning process of how to facilitate a meeting, the number of daily e-mails I send out has quadrupled. Being a college student and saying that I have actually become accustomed to waking up, being somewhere at eight a.m. and still able to function fascinates the crap out of me.

Overall, I would say that my experience here has helped prepare me for the future. It’s what I have been striving for since I was eight years old. Thanks to WSU for requiring this practicum experience to graduate and a big thanks to CCSR for having me here to receive guidance!

Class: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the student Clinton Haas. His five-year mission: to explore strange new classes, to seek out new life and new learning opportunities, to boldly go where no student has gone before.