Help! How to respectfully push for a schedule?

[Southwestspeechie]

Hi everyone, hope you're all having a nice summer! 

I am a first year grad student and my school does not give us our clinical schedules until the first day of class. Another department is interested in giving me a TA position but they need to know my clinical schedule. I know my department has a solid idea of what are clinical schedules are but for some reason they wait to release them. I want to send an e-mail to my CI and politely ask for a better idea of what my schedule will be so that I can get this TA position. My CI in the past (I was a leveling student) has made it seem like I have to work everything around clinic. 

Could anyone offer any advice on what I should say/how I should handle the situation? 

Thanks! 

[bibliophile222]

You're correct in that you do have to work everything else around clinic, but I think your CI might also be willing to work with you. I was looking at a work-study job for my first semester and asked the clinical director if there was clinic on Mondays. She replied that it would be fine to schedule me for another day and gave me Tuesday instead. That being said, programs can be different, and some arrange it so that all students have clinic on, say, Tuesdays and Thursdays. 

Another possible reason they're waiting to release clinic schedules is to match clients to the students' experience levels and even interests. My clinical director didn't decide clinical assignments until our 3rd day of orientation because she wanted to learn more about us first. I ended up doing accent mod my first semester because of my linguistics background (yay!).