Amanda DeDiego, PhD student, and Alessandra Rhinehart, PhD candidate, have each been chosen as one of ten Chi Sigma Iota Leadership Fellows.

Chi Sigma Iota (CSI) is an international honor society that focuses on promoting academic and professional excellence in counseling. CSI was established in 1985 and was created for counselors-in-training, counselor educators, and professional counselors.

The CSI Leadership Fellows Program is a yearly award designed to cultivate and support graduate counseling students by developing their skills, network, and competencies as future counseling professionals in a changing, multicultural society.

DeDiego and Rhinehart will be attending the American Counseling Association (ACA) Annual Conference and Expo in Orlando, Florida next month. As CSI Leadership Fellows, they also will provide a minimum of fifty service hours on a CSI task force/committee, receive a $600 grant from CSI, receive a hundred dollar grant from their nominating CSI Chapter (Upsilon Theta), and be recognized at the CSI Awards Ceremony with a plaque at the ACA Annual Conference and Expo.

In Upsilon Theta, DeDiego acts as Workshop Chair planning professional development activities, at times partnering with other university organizations. Rhinehart has served as Secretary, President Elect, President, and is currently acting as Past President, advising the current President. She is also on the CSI International Awards Committee Panel.

Didego and Rhinehart expressed special excitement over their training at the ACA conference next month, because they will be learning from Presidents and CEOs from organizations such as the National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC) and the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP).

Sherrie Bruner, Everett Painter, Alessandra Rhinehart, and Anna Lora Taylor teamed up to enter the American Counseling Association (ACA) Graduate Student Ethics Case Study Competition and placed 3^rd overall. All four are in the Counselor Education Program –  Bruner, Painter, and Taylor as PhD students and Rhinehart as a PhD Candidate.

ACA explains that this competition is an opportunity for graduate students to analyze a potential ethical case and create an appropriate decision-making plan of how to respond.

Once receiving the case scenario, Bruner, Painter, Rhinehart, and Taylor had to identify the dilemma, list their proposed ethical actions, justify those proposed actions, and describe the decision-making model used to arrive at that decision. They chose Welfel’s ethical decision-making model. Painter explained that this model incorporates reflection as a final step, which is not explicit in many other decision-making models. The team’s full essay response is posted on the ACA website.

They placed third out of thirty-nine teams, each winning a fifty-dollar gift certificate to the ACA Bookstore, a certificate, and letter of recognition. Plus, their names are going to be published in Counseling Today, and their team essay response will be submitted to VISTAS (an online peer-reviewed article database) for consideration of publication. Also, they have all been invited to attend the ACA Annual Conference and Expo in Orlando, Florida next month to be recognized at the National Awards Ceremony. Bruner and Rhinehart are planning to attend the conference.