For Practicum Supervisors
I am Micheal (Mike) Bonertz — a registered pharmacist in British Columbia and a student in the Master of Psychotherapy and Spirituality (Counselling stream) at St. Stephen's College, University of Alberta. I am looking for a 660-hour supervised counselling practicum in Metro Vancouver, beginning July 2027.
A student counsellor in training who is also a registered pharmacist — someone learning to sit with a person, who can already read their medication list properly.
This page exists so you can decide quickly whether I am worth a conversation.
What I am asking for
A supervised student placement, July 2027 to June 2028, at a clinic doing legal psychedelic-assisted or ketamine-assisted work. The College's structure is 660 hours in total: 300 direct client contact, 300 indirect, and 60 supervision — of which only 35 supervision hours come from the site, the remaining 25 through my course. St. Stephen's maintains professional liability insurance of five million dollars covering students engaged in the provision of counselling, and a Certificate of Insurance is available on request. I also hold a current Police Information Check with Vulnerable Sector Search.
I am a student. I am not a psychotherapist, not a registered clinical counsellor, and I do not hold a protected title. Everything I would do at your site would be under your supervision, inside your scope, and to your standards.
What I would bring that a typical student does not
I have been a licensed pharmacist for sixteen years, and have worked in pharmacies for more than twenty years all told, across British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories. I am registered with the College of Pharmacists of British Columbia in the Full Pharmacist class, in good standing, and I hold full prescriptive authority under British Columbia's minor ailments scope.
In practice that means a student who already reads a medication list the way you would want one read: serotonergic load, MAOI interactions, tapering realities, QT risk, the difference between a drug interaction that matters and one that only looks alarming on a screen. Screening is where psychedelic-assisted care is most exposed, and it is the part of the work I have spent a career inside.
I have also written and volunteered in this field for several years — with MAPS Canada's Psychedelic Access Community of Practice, TheraPsil, and the Psychedelic Association of Canada — and I have contributed to published policy and public-education work on compassionate access.
What I am looking for in a site
- Real therapy delivery, not only intake and administration. The programme's hours need to be relational counselling work.
- A supervisor willing to observe directly — co-facilitated sessions, live sit-in, or recorded sessions reviewed in supervision. Direct observation is the hardest requirement to satisfy after the fact and the easiest to design in from the start.
- The ability to video-record individual sessions, with written client consent. Two required practicum papers are based on video-recorded individual sessions, so a site that cannot allow recording cannot host the placement.
- Honesty about what the placement can and cannot offer. A smaller, well-supervised placement is worth more to me than a large one with thin oversight.
What happens next
If any of this is useful to you, I would welcome a short conversation — no commitment, no paperwork. I can supply a candidate profile, a clinical CV, and referees who have already agreed to speak for me.
Email: mbonertz@ualberta.ca
- What a Pharmacist Adds to a Counselling Team — the case for the unusual candidate, and its honest limits
- Medication Safety Screening in Psychedelic Care — what careful screening involves
- Education and Credentials — everything I hold, and what it does not qualify me to do
- Publications and Contributions — exact credit for collaborative work
- Practicum FAQ — the questions clinics actually ask
- Harm Reduction in Practice — habits rather than philosophy
- Rural, Remote and Northern Practice — what changes when the referral is not available
- Two-Eyed Seeing — Elder Albert Marshall's framing, and why it matters here
- About This Archive — how to read the older material on this site
This site is education and policy literacy only. It is not medical advice, a diagnosis, a prescription, or an offer of psychedelic-assisted therapy.