Ferrum, VA, September 7, 2026 — For Ashton Lambeth, Ferrum College has never simply been a place where she earned a degree.
In fact, she has earned three of them.
A former Ferrum student-athlete, undergraduate alumna, and member of the College’s earliest graduate psychology cohorts, Lambeth has now added another first to a Ferrum story that has spanned much of her adult life: she has become the first graduate of Ferrum College’s M.S. in Clinical and Counseling Psychology program to receive approval from the Virginia Board of Counseling as a Resident in Counseling.
The approval allows Lambeth to begin the supervised residency that leads toward independent licensure as a Licensed Professional Counselor in Virginia. It also marks an important milestone for one of Ferrum’s newest graduate programs, providing its first successful Virginia licensure-pathway outcome.
For Dr. Ryan Cooper, director of graduate psychology programs, the milestone carries particular significance because Lambeth has been part of the graduate psychology program almost from its beginning.
“Ashton embodies both what Ferrum College stands for and what you would want in a mental healthcare provider,” Cooper said. “There is a reason ferrum means iron. We talk about the resilient spirit of our students, and Ashton is one of the clearest examples of what that actually looks like.”
Ferrum, From the Beginning
Lambeth’s Ferrum career began well before graduate school. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the College in 2020 and was a five-year starter for the Ferrum Panthers softball team, earning all-conference honors as a freshman. Her collegiate career included the difficult 2020 season, when Ferrum was ranked No. 13 nationally in Division III before the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly ended the season. An additional year of eligibility ultimately meant that Lambeth continued competing for Ferrum even as she began her first master’s degree.
“I originally came to Ferrum focused almost entirely on softball and honestly had no idea what I wanted to do with my life,” Lambeth said. “Then, during my sophomore year, I took a general education psychology course with Dr. Angie Dahl, and it changed the direction of my life. It sparked this interest in understanding people for who they are and what they have been through.”
After graduation she returned to Ferrum as one of the College’s earliest graduate psychology students, joining the original 30-credit M.S. in Psychology program during its formative years.
Being among the first students in a new graduate program can require a particular kind of flexibility. Courses develop. Curriculum evolves. Processes that later cohorts may take for granted are still being built.
But Lambeth stayed.
She completed the M.S. in Psychology in 2021, including the program’s rigorous thesis pathway, at a time when Ferrum’s graduate psychology offerings were themselves still taking shape.
That original program would soon begin earning recognition beyond Ferrum as well. In early 2024, Forbes Advisor included Ferrum College’s M.S. in Psychology among its “Best Online Psychology Master’s Degrees of 2024.”
Then Ferrum built something new.
In 2024, the College launched the 60-credit M.S. in Clinical and Counseling Psychology, a practitioner-scholar program designed to provide the academic and clinical preparation commonly required for professional counseling and master’s-level psychology licensure. Rather than simply moving on with the graduate degree she had already earned, Lambeth chose to come back and do thirty more credits.
That decision required a different kind of trust.
“Ashton was willing to return to Ferrum and place a tremendous amount of faith in us,” Cooper said. “She trusted that the clinical program we were building would ultimately realize the licensure pathway we believed it would. She had already made it through one master’s degree while our graduate program was finding its sea legs, and then she essentially said, ‘Okay, let’s do it again.’ And she did.”
The newer program has since begun receiving recognition of its own. Just this year, OnlinePsychologyPrograms.org ranked Ferrum College’s M.S. in Clinical and Counseling Psychology first in its guide to the Best Psychology Master’s Programs in Virginia, highlighting the program’s practitioner-scholar approach, clinical training, and emphasis on maintaining Ferrum’s community-centered identity even in an online environment.
She Did It Twice
Graduate school is demanding under ordinary circumstances. Lambeth completed two different master’s programs by 2025 while simultaneously watching a young graduate psychology program grow around her.
Her academic path has also been unusually broad. Lambeth is among the small number of Ferrum graduate psychology students to have completed both a formal graduate thesis and the substantial clinical training requirements of a counseling practicum.
The first demanded sustained research, scholarship, analysis, and academic writing. The second required her to translate that academic foundation into direct clinical work with real clients.
And with that came a new kind of test. For the first time, Lambeth was no longer demonstrating what she had learned only to Ferrum professors. She and her faculty were demonstrating to the community what a Ferrum-trained clinician could offer. Clients, supervisors, and community partners became part of the audience for Ferrum’s clinical training.
Dr. Angie Dahl, a longtime Ferrum College administrator and psychology professor who served as Lambeth’s faculty supervisor during her practicum, had a front-row seat as that transition unfolded.
“Ashton represented Ferrum exceptionally well in the community,” Dahl said. “She brought the same thoughtfulness, professionalism, and genuine care for people to her clinical work that we had seen from her as a student. For faculty, it was incredibly rewarding to watch her take what she had learned at Ferrum and demonstrate what a Ferrum-trained clinician could offer beyond the classroom.”
Lambeth’s professional development outside Ferrum has followed the same trajectory. She has worked in mental health settings serving children and families and earned recognition as a Qualified Mental Health Professional (QMHP) for children before advancing into clinical counseling work. Colleagues have described her as empathic, flexible, strengths-based, and particularly attentive to systemic barriers that can keep people from receiving mental healthcare.
Today, her clinical work continues through Pura Vida Counseling and Wellness in Virginia as she moves from graduate clinical training into professional residency.
Through all of it, Cooper said, Lambeth retained the qualities faculty came to associate with her from the beginning. “She kept her love of people. She kept her passion for mental healthcare. She kept her humor and her poise,” he said. “Programs change. Requirements change. Graduate school gets hard. Life gets hard. Ashton just keeps going.”
A Milestone for Student and Program
The significance of Lambeth’s board approval extends beyond an individual accomplishment.
Ferrum’s M.S. in Clinical and Counseling Psychology was deliberately developed as an interdisciplinary clinical degree. Its faculty includes both psychologists and professional counselors, intentionally preparing students to navigate state-specific licensure requirements for both disciplines. The College has emphasized from the program’s inception that licensing boards, not colleges or universities, ultimately determine whether an individual applicant qualifies for licensure.
For Virginia students, that made the first application especially important.
Lambeth’s approval provides the program with its first real-world confirmation of the pathway its faculty and students have spent the past several years building.
“As faculty, you can study regulations, design curricula, communicate with boards, map every course, and build what you believe is a strong licensure program,” Cooper said. “But there is still something different about the day one of your graduates submits that degree to the board and the answer comes back: approved. Ashton got to be that student for us.”
She will now complete her residency under Virginia’s professional counseling requirements as she works toward full, independent LPC licensure.
The Meaning of Ferrum
There is an appropriate symbolism in Lambeth’s story. Because the College’s name comes from the Latin word for iron, ferrum, for generations Ferrum has associated that name with strength, endurance, and resilience. Lambeth’s path offers an unusually literal example of those ideals: undergraduate student and Panther athlete, graduate student, thesis researcher, returning graduate student, clinical trainee, and now Resident in Counseling.
“Ferrum has always been a special place to me,” Lambeth said. “My professors were professional, but they were also personal in a way that made my education there unique. I genuinely felt like I mattered. Ferrum gave me the confidence to keep pushing toward my goals, and in a lot of ways, it is where I found myself. I’m incredibly honored to be a three-time Ferrum alumna.”
“Ashton will always occupy a special place in the history of our program,” Cooper said. “She was here when we were building it. Then she came back and helped us build the next version of it. And now she is the person who gets to cross this particular finish line first.”
For Lambeth, however, the newest milestone is less a finish line than the beginning of another stage. Residency brings new clinical responsibilities, continued supervision, and the accumulation of the experience required for independent practice.
If Cooper has his way, Lambeth’s Ferrum story may not be finished yet. He has long teased the possibility of a future Ferrum Doctor of Psychology program and joked that Ashton may eventually find herself back at Ferrum for degree number four.
If her history at Ferrum is any indication, she is familiar with long roads. She keeps walking them anyway.
And this time, she has made a little Ferrum history along the way.
Click here for information on Ferrum College’s M.S. in in Clinical and Counseling Psychology.
