I’m Fredrick Emery, and I’m a native of Enfield, New Hampshire — born and raised here, and still calling it home.

Before psychology became my focus, I spent time working in healthcare from a different angle: doing medical documentation, working as a clinical secretary, and working as a licensed nursing assistant. That work put me in the room for a lot of people’s hardest days, and it’s a big part of why I ended up here — I kept noticing that the emotional and psychological side of care mattered just as much as the clinical side, and I wanted to be the person addressing that directly instead of adjacent to it.

Earlier this year, I started volunteering as a CASA GAL, and that experience is what turned this from an idea I’d been circling for a while into something I couldn’t ignore. It’s one thing to think you’d be good at this work in the abstract; it’s another to actually sit with someone during a hard chapter of their life and feel, unmistakably, that this is what you’re supposed to be doing. That’s what happened. What used to be a quiet idea in the back of my head became a calling I couldn’t talk myself out of.

So I went back to school. I’m currently working through my undergraduate degree in psychology, and I’m doing it deliberately: using programs like Sophia Learning to move through my coursework efficiently and affordably, with the goal of finishing in a year and a half or less. My plan after that is to apply to Plymouth State University’s Clinical Mental Health Counseling master’s program. I’m paying for all of it — undergrad through grad school — out of pocket, with no debt. Not because it’s the easy way, but because I think it’s possible, and I want to prove that to myself and to anyone else considering the same route.

This site is where I’m documenting that path honestly: what I’m learning in my classes, what’s actually working to save time and money, and what the experience is teaching me personally along the way. My hope is that it’s useful whether you’re a student figuring out your own version of this route, or just someone curious about psychology who doesn’t have the time, money, or interest to sit in a lecture hall for it.

I write as things happen — new classes, new techniques, new experiences — so following along here means catching my process close to real time, not in a retrospective dump months later.