School Guidance Counselor Making a Difference
Kate Jones

            Mrs. Karen Bryan, guidance counselor of the Thomasville City Scholars Academy, has been counseling students for over 25 years.  She has worked at Hardy Junior High in Florida, Thomasville High School, and here.  She attended ABAC for two years, GSU for one year, and VSU for her last year of college.  

She decided to become a counselor after teaching at a previous school.  Students frequently came to her with their problems and she felt like she could really make a difference in the lives of students.  Administrators also encouraged her to become a guidance counselor because they felt she could do the job and would do great at it.  The hardest parts of Mrs. Bryan’s job are different things at different times.  

“It is hard to deal with situations involving deaths in the students’ lives.  Going to hospitals to visit them and seeing a terminal illness affect a student is always hard,” said Mrs. Bryan.  Also, the paperwork and reaching deadlines is always stressful.  She said, “Another hard aspect of my job is trying to convince a student with extreme potential of the importance of using their capabilities.  It’s hard to get some students to understand how important it is to work hard and use the brain they were born with.”

Students are Mrs. Bryan’s favorite part of her job. She loves working with seniors and helping them with college applications and scholarship forms. “I call myself an advisor, not necessarily their friend; I want them to trust me, but I feel I do less counseling and more advising,” she added.

            In her spare time, Mrs. Bryan loves to garden and grow orchids with her husband.  She likes it because she enjoys the quiet and loves to spend time with her husband.  Traveling and spoiling her grandchildren are a couple of other things she enjoys doing outside of school.

            “I love my job,” she added. “It is a job of tremendous variety. If I could pick something to wake up and do, this would be it because I know that there is always going to be a variety of exciting things for me to accomplish that day.”