Student Spotlight: Janine Gee

“People are immensely complicated and unique and interesting and fascinating,” reflected Janine Gee, a third- year student in the Wright Institute’s Counseling Psychology program. “Getting to be present with someone and be part of their journey - I think that's the piece that I've enjoyed the most about all of the work that I've done.”

Janine was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, where she lived with her parents and two sisters. “One part of my childhood that felt unique, especially back then, was that my dad was a stay-at-home parent,” she shared. “I’m also biracial - my dad is Chinese and my mom is white - so that was also a part of growing up that felt a little different.” Janine and her sisters attended public schools and always lived close enough that they could walk to school each day. Growing up, Janine spent a lot of time with her older sister, who was just two years her senior. When her little sister was born, Janine was six and accustomed to being the youngest, but the two of them formed a close bond as they got older as well.

For her undergraduate studies, Janine attended the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she earned her BA in English literature in 2007. “I lived at home and commuted to school for undergrad,” she explained. “It was great from a financial standpoint, but it made my college experience a little different.” Choosing a major was easy for Janine because she had always loved reading and writing and thoroughly enjoyed her English literature courses. She also chose to minor in sociology, which she found very intriguing. “It was the first time anyone had helped me to see things from more of a systemic level and I was just fascinated by that,” she reflected. “It also helped me understand my identity as a mixed race person, which was something we didn’t talk about a lot in my family.”

After graduating from UBC in 2007, Janine began working at Shaw Cable in Vancouver. “What I loved most about that job was that I got to do hiring and I got to do a lot of mentoring and coaching with people,” she recalled. “The telecommunication industry itself was not my thing, but I got a lot of one-on-one time with people and that was the part that really lit me up.” By the time she left in 2011, Janine had advanced from answering calls to the role of supervisor in their Customer Care and Sales department where she led a team of 25-30 employees. “I understood what the people that I was working with were experiencing and it gave me a lot of empathy for their experience,” she shared. “Thinking about sales and metrics was the part that I enjoyed least, but I always took a relationship first stance with that - I figured if I focused on the relationships, all of those things would sort of come and they did.”

In 2011, Janine moved to the Bay Area and began the immigration process. For five years, she was unable to work in the United States, so she spent her time volunteering. In 2013, Janine began volunteering with an organization called Community Grows in San Francisco, where she worked with elementary school students to help them develop an interest in growing fresh food. At that time, she also joined a program offered through Bi-Rite & 18 Reasons called Farm School, where she learned about organic farming. “It's a small program where you have guest speakers that are working in the industry and you also go to visit the farms and see what they're doing,” she explained. “They even had a small plot of land that they were farming, so we'd get to go out and actually feel what it felt like to plant an entire line of beans or harvest an entire row of tomatoes.” Family dinners had been an essential aspect of Janine’s family growing up and she loved this opportunity to learn about where her food was coming from and how it was cultivated. The following year, the Farm School asked Janine to be their Program Coordinator.

After three years in that role, Janine moved on to a new opportunity as the Program Manager for Culinary Artistas from 2016-17. Culinary Artistas was an innovative kids cooking studio and event space where Janine was in charge of operations as well as teaching classes. “It was tricky because it was a brand new business and it was just the owner, myself, and a couple of other people,” she recalled. “I had a background with administrative and customer facing work and I had also worked with kids, so it was sort of a nice mix in between.” Janine particularly enjoyed inspiring picky eaters to try new things through the cooking process. “I always loved cooking as a kid, so being able to kind of see that light bulb go on for young kids was really rewarding,” she reflected. “It was a really beautiful thing.”

Janine enrolled in the Holistic Nutrition Coaching and Culinary program at Bauman College in Berkeley in 2018. “I’m really interested in taking really good care of the self, so I was drawn to their program and I got a lot out of it,” she shared. “They're very holistically minded, so we focused on how to nourish yourself and feed yourself in order to be strong and have a lot of energy.” While Janine loved their program, she discovered when she sat down one-on-one with clients, she wanted to go deeper than just talking about food and was curious about the bigger picture that shaped their mindset. “I had wanted to become a counselor for a long time, but I think I needed that experience to see that it made sense for me,” she reflected. “I realized that I could embark on the bigger journey of pursuing a full masters degree, which no one in my family had done before - it was sort of eye opening to realize it was possible.”

In December of 2019, Janine and her partner became parents for the first time. While Janine had planned to stay home with her daughter short-term, that quickly changed as the COVID-19 pandemic began when her daughter was only four months old. “It was a really hard and scary time for everybody,” she recalled, “On the other hand, we were in a little bubble with our family where we were safe and got to have all of that time with her.” Thankfully, when her daughter was about a year old, Janine connected with a small group of families with kids around the same age to arrange outdoor play dates for their little ones.

From 2021-2022, Janine was a student in the Oh Baby School of Holistic Nutrition’s “Master” Program in Pregnancy, Postpartum, and Baby, where she worked with pregnant and postpartum clients with a focus on rebalancing the body through nutritional support. “I knew a lot about nutrition from my time at Bauman College, so I took my nutrition really seriously while I was pregnant and I had a really great pregnancy,” she explained. “I wanted to be able to share that information with more people, but I wanted to make sure I had the necessary competency level.” While Janine enjoyed the program, in the end she was drawn back to the idea of becoming a therapist instead.

In the fall of 2024, Janine enrolled in the Wright Institute’s Counseling Psychology program. She had first considered psychology as a career path in her early twenties, but it finally felt like she was ready for it. Janine was encouraged to join the Wright Institute by a good friend who was starting, and once she began doing her research, she found that it had an excellent reputation as well. Janine was also drawn to the structure of the weekend program, which allowed her to attend classes in person on the weekend while being home for her daughter during the week, and the relational emphasis of the cohort model. “The Wright Institute made so much sense for me, so I actually didn’t apply anywhere else - I figured I’d apply and, if I didn’t get in, I could reassess in a year,” she laughed. “It was one of those things where it just all came together at the right time, so I jumped in!”

Janine’s experience with the Wright Institute’s cohort model was as positive as she hoped it would be. “I feel like the cohort model itself is its own process of growth and discovery that is going on alongside the academic portion,” she reflected. “Because you're not graded on a curve, everybody's encouraged to help each other, so we shared study guides and would get together at lunch and study.” At this point, it’s hard for Janine to imagine what her experience at the Wright would have been like without her cohortmates by her side. “My cohort was very vulnerable as far as our willingness to go deep and share who we were, but there was also a lot of humor,” she explained. Although most of her cohort has graduated, Janine is excited to keep in touch with them as they all begin their careers.

Looking back on her time at the Wright Institute, there are several professors and courses that Janine feels left a lasting impact on her. In Family Therapy I course with Professor Dorsey, Janine learned to think systemically about the ways families operate and she appreciated the focus on students reflecting on their own family experiences as part of the process. Janine also loved her Crisis, Disaster, and Trauma Counseling class with Professor Biasetto. “I knew I wanted to work with trauma, but watching it modeled in her classroom structure and the way that she teaches was very inspiring to me,” she shared. One of the biggest lessons Janine learned during her time as a student was that just as each instructor’s style appealed to different students, each therapist’s style appeals to different clients. “As a therapist, you have to cultivate your own individual self and that is going to draw some people in and not others,” she reflected. “I’m learning to get out of my head about needing to get it right and work on finding the version of myself that's as authentically present as possible.”

During her time as a student, Janine made it a priority to be involved in student leadership. Since September 2025, Janine has been a student representative on the Counseling Program Advisory Board. “I joined CPAB because I thought it sounded really interesting because I care a lot about the student experience,” she explained. “It seemed like a great opportunity to be more plugged into the community and I’ve really enjoyed it.” Janine is also serving as a member of the Wright Institute Presidential Search Committee this year, which she thinks of as her way of leaving a lasting impact on the Wright Institute.

Janine chose to defer her practicum to a third year, so she is excited to be starting her practicum this fall at Bay Area Community Resources (BACR). “I just wanted to take my time and I was lucky to be able to do that,” she reflected. “It allowed me the immense privilege of being able to be present with my daughter and having that extra time where I could pick her up from school and be that anchor while she's little, which just felt really important.” Janine also loved that deferring allowed her more time to soak in the content of her courses and enjoy the experience of being a student. When it came time to choose her practicum site, applying at BACR was an easy decision. “BACR has a great reputation and everyone I know who did their practicum there had a really positive experience,” she shared. “I love that they do didactic training as you go and that I’ll get to be part of a brand new cohort.”

Going to school and being a parent doesn’t leave Janine much time to pursue her own interests. When she does find a free moment, one of Janine’s favorite things to do is sit down with a fiction book. “I love books that tell you what it’s like to be the character and show you life through this particular person’s point of view and experiences,” Janine explained. “I like authors like Sally Rooney and Rachel Husk - when you’re reading their books, you feel like you’re learning about the human experience.” She also loves shopping at local farmer’s markets and preparing fresh, seasonal meals for her family. Janine’s newest interest is strength training and she’s eager to learn more and see where it takes her.

Janine is excited to say she’s very open about what the future holds for her after she graduates next fall. “I’m in a position where I want to be open to the process,” she reflected. “I want to take the next year to get more of a sense of things.” If she were to imagine what might be next, Janine would envision working in a private practice with clients who are thinking about or in the process of growing their family. “I want to work with people to help them become more engaged, to bring the family together, to help them make sense of things that have happened in their past and be really intentional about the kind of parents that they want to be,” she explained. “I hope to work with all sorts of different kinds of family constellations because it’s really fascinating work.”