Ms. Lauren Creighton is a first-year school counselor at West Potomac. Before starting at West Potomac in November, she was a long-term substitute school counselor at South County.

Creighton chose to be a school counselor because she wanted students to be comfortable at school.

“One of the things that really got me interested in school counseling was when I was in eighth grade and the first school shooting happened at Columbine,” she said. “School should be a place where students feel safe to go and I always knew that I wanted to help students feel safe at school.”

Her interest in helping students decide what they want to do after graduation contributed to her career choice. She thinks this is a time in students’ lives where they are trying to figure out who they are, and that it’s nice to be able to guide students in a path that relates to their interests and where they will be most successful.

Creighton graduated from Washington college in Chestertown, Maryland and got her masters from Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland.

“In college I studied clinical counseling psychology and then in graduate school I got my masters in education with a specialization in school counseling,” she said.

She enjoys working with youth, and after college she followed a career in working with children and adolescents.

“I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do career-wise,” Creighton said. “But I knew that I liked working with children and adolescents, and my first job out of college was a special education assistant in the school system.”

Creighton used her job as a special education assistant to look multiple options in that field.

“I used that opportunity to look at all the different careers I could do in the school system and I was kind of between going the special education route, the school social worker route, or the school counselor route,” she said. “I talked with each person and kind of shadowed what they did a little bit.”

Creighton enjoys helping others and guiding people in what they want to do after graduating from high school. Her favorite part of working in West Potomac is the diversity of the school.

“I love working with students from all the different cultures,” she said. “I think it’s fascinating how there are so many different languages here and I love being a part of it.”

She would have probably gone into special education if she hadn’t become a school counselor.

“I love working with individuals with disabilities,” Creighton said. “I have a cousin who’s my age who has Down syndrome and just seeing the opportunities [for] individuals who have disabilities… it’s just wonderful.”

After playing ponytail softball, which is like little league baseball for girls, she continued to play softball in high school.

“I chose to play softball because I played ponytail softball growing up through elementary school,” Creighton said. “My dad was the coach and he played baseball so he encouraged my sister and me to play softball. We grew up as big Baltimore Oriole fans.”

Creighton’s favorite type of music to listen to is country music.

“I think it’s soothing,” she said. “If I ever have a really long day, I can just put music on and it kind of just takes away everything else.”

Creighton’s role model growing up was her high school adviser at her boarding school in Pennsylvania.

“I actually went to boarding school [in Pennsylvania] for high school and I had someone that was an adviser,” she said. “It was kind of like your mother away from home, and that was another reason I wanted to go into counseling. I saw that I had this person helping throughout high school and I wanted to give back and do that to others. I would say she was kind of like my dorm mother and my role model. She helped with any academic, personal, and social counseling.”

Creighton would like for students to come and stop by and introduce themselves.