4 Graduate Students Earn Second Place in National Counseling Ethics Competition

Left to right, Jill Arlaud, Crystal-Dior Glover, Zhaoxuan (Daisy) Zhou and Zonovia Proctor won Second Place nationally in the 2020 American Counseling Association’s Graduate Student Ethics Awards for Master’s Degree Students.

Four Stetson graduate students spent last Christmas break working by video-conference calls from California, New York and DeLand to write an entry for the American Counseling Association’s Graduate Student Ethics competition.

“Oh, my gosh, we worked on it a long time,” said Zonovia Proctor, one of the four students in Stetson’s graduate Counselor Education program.

But it paid off when the team – Proctor, Jill Arlaud, Crystal-Dior Glover and Zhaoxuan (Daisy) Zhou – recently won Second Place nationally in the ACA Graduate Student Ethics Awards for Master’s Degree Students.  

“It was really great to do something that gave Stetson national recognition,” Proctor said. “In addition, it just worked out that the four of us are very diverse. I’m from the Bahamas. Daisy is from China. Jill is from Suriname (on the northeastern coast of South America) and Crystal is African-American.

“So, it was pretty nice to be a bunch of women of color doing something like this for our university,” she said.

The four students currently are counseling interns at the House Next Door in DeLand and Daytona Beach.

Leila Roach, PhD

Each of them will receive $75 and a certificate of recognition from the American Counseling Association. They were scheduled to be recognized at the ACA annual conference in San Diego on April 16-19, and student Daisy Zhou had planned to attend, along with faculty sponsor Leila Roach, PhD, Chair and associate professor of Counselor Education at Stetson. But the conference was canceled due to COVID-19.

“We have had students enter in the past, but we have not had anyone place this well,” Roach said of the team’s winning entry. “This is the first time.

“These are very strong students,” she added. “They’ve had excellent instruction in ethics and in particular in this area, we have intentionally focused not only on ethics in our core classes that teach ethics and professional issues, but also across all curriculum.”

In addition to the national award, the four students also won the Stetson Counselor Education Ethics Award in December and split the award’s $1,000 prize. 

This was the first time that Stetson gave out the award, thanks to an additional endowment from the late George and Mary Hood, Roach said. Teams of students will compete each December for the award, and the winning team automatically will submit an entry to the ACA’s national competition on behalf of Stetson University.

George Hood, PhD, was former dean of students, professor and director of Student Counseling Services at Stetson. His wife, Mary Turner Hood, was a longtime assistant to President and Chancellor J. Ollie Edmunds. 

“The students actually received funding from us in order to develop this project, so I think the additional department support also helped them,” Roach said. “It’s nice to see George and Mary Hood are still influencing our department and supporting our students through the endowment that we have.”