Counselor's book helps students with career choices

Richard Sharf

Life's Choices: Problems & Solutions, the most recent of three books by Richard Sharf, Center for Counseling and Student Development, is aimed at helping students in two-year community college programs make practical educational and career choices.

Community college students may pursue a different academic curriculum from that of their counterparts in traditional four-year college programs, but they often share similar anxieties when dealing with educational decisions and personal concerns.

These concerns range from depression, eating disorders and substance abuse to relationship problems and the need to make prudent academic and career decisions.

"This is for students who may be interested in expanding their academic careers, but at the moment have more pressing choices to make," Sharf said. "They want practical suggestions they can apply to themselves."

During his 30-year career as a senior psychologist at the center, Sharf has counseled many students on personal and career development issues.

In Life's Choices, Problems and Solutions he addresses subject areas that include education and career decisions, the nature and meaning of relationships and the strategies for resolving the wide range of personal concerns faced by community college students.

"The focus of these learning issues is the discovery of one's individual abilities and values, and matching these qualities to the existing labor market," Sharf said.

Relationship issues discussed by Sharf range from intimate ties of kinship between family members to friendships and societal association with individuals of different genders and cultures.

To help individuals successfully resolve personal concerns, Sharf looks at stress management options and the treatment of substance abuse.

"I saw a need to help students who were not very focused academically," Sharf said. "I wanted to bridge the psychological informational gap for these students to make it easier for them to make the more difficult decisions that may await them."

Although the ideas and solutions offered in Life's Choices, Problems & Solutions are written primarily for community college students, Sharf's principal academic efforts involve working with the many graduate students and interns that he teaches or supervises at the Center for Counseling and Student Development. ?

As a result of this experience, Sharf has written two graduate- level textbooks for students interested in careers as high school counselors and human service professionals in the public and private sectors.

Applying Career Development Theory to Counseling, which will appear in its third edition in June, explains the approaches that exist for understanding the way people make career choices across the lifespan and shows how these theories can be applied to the counseling experience.

While his first textbook focuses on the career decision-making process, Theories of Psychotherapy & Counseling: Concepts and Cases, published in 1999, looks at theories such as psychoanalysis, Jungian analysis, Alderian, cognitive and behavior therapy and how these theories may be used separately or collectively to achieve counseling objectives.

"This book provides graduate students and professionals with an overview of the more common treatment practices available," Sharf said. "A number of mental health professionals use a variety of theories, depending on the nature of the problem they are treating."

For Sharf, the decision to pursue a career in professional counseling and teaching at the college level came while he was working in his father's Boston-based wholesale toy and sporting goods business.

"I found the work did not satisfy my need to help others," Sharf said. "So, I reconsidered my situation and decided to return to graduate school."

A 1961 graduate of Brown University, where he received a B.A. in psychology, Sharf earned a master's degree in general psychology from Temple University in 1966 and a Ph.D. degree in counseling psychology from the University of Iowa in 1968.

Sharf, who is the author of 20 papers describing program and counseling center evaluation techniques, also has developed a computerized training method for vocational counseling that uses computer-generated client responses.

While he enjoys teaching graduate-level courses and authoring textbooks for graduate and postgraduate students as well as community college students, Sharf said he believes the most satisfying part of his involvement with the Center for Counseling and Student Development is helping students with personal and career concerns.

"I continue to enjoy working with students and helping them with their concerns," Sharf said. "I also enjoy helping people learn to make decisions in their lives, and my books reflect this interest."

–Jerry Rhodes