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It's my first day back at school and I am ambivalent about it. I am happy that I am now over half way done with my foundation year, but I'm dreading the inevitable lack of social life that starts today. Last semester I took 2 online classes, so I only had to spend 6 hours in class per week (my 2 other classes). This semester I'm not taking any online classes, so that means I'm spending 12 hours in class per week. I have a feeling that time is going to really add up and make this semester more stressful. As far as classes go, I feel pretty behind. I still haven't bought any books; in part because I spent all my money on tuition! It was a huge weight off my shoulders to finally pay that bill, but now I am literally living pay check to pay check. Hopefully I can make enough this week at my ballroom dance job to buy some essential books!
On a happier note, my internship started 2 weeks ago and it's been going great! I just started 2 groups at the school. One of them is a dance group for troubled 12-year-old girls after school. I am working with 6 girls teaching them dance and giving them a chance to work together, build self-esteem, and make friends. It is really fun! I am also going to start my macro field project in February. I am teaching a group of Hispanic mothers who currently meet every Tuesday with Linkages to Learning (my internship) how to dance tango and salsa. It is part of their fitness and nutrition program, and I think it is going to be a blast! I get credit for it through the school, and I get to teach these women how to do something I love. I'm really enjoying my internship, and I can definitely see myself working at a school-based mental health organization like this in the future.
I cannot tell you how GREAT it feels to be done with this semester! I finally have a break! The beginning of the year was a tease. I felt like I had all the time in the world to get things done. But in grad school, your final grade all boils down to what you turn in during the last few weeks of school. That is why the last few weeks have been soooo stressful. I am going to revel in this well deserved break, and enjoy the time I have before I have no time again come January 20th.
So what will I do with my free time? Well, there's always work. 20 hours a week I'll still be employed at my night job as a ballroom dance teacher. I will also be painting my dad's basement in order to make a few extra bucks to pay for the second half of this year's tuition. Which, by the way, is due January 25th. EEEkkk. I'll also apply to my advanced field placement for next year! I'm really excited, there seem to be a lot of choices for me to sift through, especially in the mental health sector. For my foundation year I didn't get to chose a placement - I just got really lucky. Next year I get a say, and I get to pick my top 3 dream field placements from a list provided by the school and submit my resume. If things go well, I'll be exactly where I want. I don't know where that is yet, but I'll figure that out in the next couple months. The rest of my free time, I'll spend with family, friends, and the boyfriend. And maybe catch a movie here or there. I walked to the movies during the blizzard and saw Avatar last night. SO GOOD! I highly recommend it.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy your break as much as I enjoy mine.
Happy Holidays!
I just had my first final yesterday. I think it actually went pretty well. Now the trick is figuring out how I'm going to start/finish a 15 page paper and a 6 page paper by next Wednesday without completely blowing off the 12 page paper and final exam I have the week after. AHhhhh.......... I am ready for the semester to be OVER! Now that I'm working at the ballroom dance studio 20 hours a week, it is a LOT harder to get all my work done. At first it wasn't so bad, but now that all the deadlines are looming it feels a lot more overwhelming. My grade in one class is actually dropping a bit because of it. The problem is, once the weekend hits all I want to do is relax because I'm so exhausted from the week. But I really need to use that time to study and write. It requires a great deal of will power, but I guess that's what you have to expect when you are going to graduate school full time and maintaining a job at the same time.
On a lighter note, winter break is coming and I CANNOT WAIT! I can finally catch up on some R&R, make a little extra money working for my dad painting his basement, see some friends I've ignored for the past 3 months, and eat. Eat a lot. Happy Holidays everybody :o)
The day I was supposed to register for my classes, I completely forgot. I finally remembered the next day at my internship (a place where I have no computer) and I freaked out because my friends who commute to Baltimore people told me that registration is very competitive and you have to wake up at 6am the day of registration just to get what you want. I wasn't sure if the Shady Grove campus is the same way about registration, but I didn't want to risk getting held back to find out.
So I borrowed a co-workers computer to web-register and I only got 3 of the 5 classes I wanted at Shady Grove. I called the school and luckily I was able to get in to the other 2, but it was a close call. A word from the wise - err on the side of caution and register for your classes ASAP!
One thing I really dislike about this school is the academic adviser system. I had several questions about what classes to sign up for, and academic requirements, and my adviser never made any contact with me whatsoever. In fact, I never got any notice about who my adviser is, where to contact him, or how to reach him from the adviser or the school. I had to ask a teacher where to find the master adviser/advisee list online (a complicated process) before I finally found his name and location in Baltimore. I e-mailed my adviser to tell him about the classes I was interested in, and he responded with, "you don't need to talk to me about these choices." Well, if I'm not supposed to talk to him about my classes, then who exactly should I talk to? And what exactly is his role? I guess I am used to undergrad where it is a requirement that you meet with your academic adviser to discuss class choices before every single registration. Maybe things are different in graduate school, but this is one change I do not like. You are really on your own here as far as registration and class selection, so make sure you are on the ball!
This past couple weeks have been very stressful. Adding the extra 20 hours of work and stress a week onto my full course load and 16 hour/week internship is really taking it's toll on my mind and body. And now, I have a cold :o(
But cold be damned, I'm still going out in D.C. for Halloween!
My Faculty Liaison - the professor responsible for making sure I'm learning what I need to be learning at my field placement - came for a site visit to my middle school on Tuesday. It was really great to sit down with her and my supervisor for Linkages to Learning to discuss my progress as an adolescent mental health counselor AND how I feel about being in an MSW student. She answered a lot of my questions and really motivated me to stick with the program. I told her how it was difficult for me to choose between the MSW program and a clinical psychology PhD program. She told me that social workers actually do 90% of the counseling in America, and 70% of graduates from UMD, Baltimore typically have 3 or 4 different people working under them after 3 years of graduation from the program. It really helped me realize that even though I'm not in a PhD program, I am still in a very prestigious masters program that will help me reach my goal of becoming a mental health counselor faster.
At my internship I am also working towards establishing a group therapy class after school for 7th grade girls. I will get referrals from the guidance office for girls struggling with self-esteem, and then meet with them after school in the auxiliary gym at the middle school to work on self-expression, mutual respect, and social skills through dancing. I'm pretty excited because so far I've only been doing individual therapy and I've only worked with boys. I'll keep you posted on the progress...
Well, mid-terms are over. And when I say mid-terms I actually mean 1 test and 3 papers. Luckily I wrote one of the papers early on in the semester, so I wasn't too stressed. Compared to undergrad, the papers were not that difficult, and the test took questions directly from previous quizzes. On the whole, I think I'm doing pretty well right now.
I begin teaching at my ballroom dance studio next week! I'm pretty excited about it. My ballroom dance director keeps saying that being a ballroom dance teacher is a lot like being a therapist, so hopefully it will be good practice for my internship as a mental health counselor in a middle school.
As far as my internship goes, I now have 2 clients. I'm still working on putting a group together and also getting 1 more individual client. I'm having a difficult time getting the last individual's mother to come in for an intake though, which apparently is par for the course. She keeps standing me up. I also completed my first process recording for my field placement. For a process recording, all students at UMD have to write down EVERYthing that is said during a single session and record it online. Since my sessions are 45-55 minutes each, this is a very tedious process. Then we are expected to write down reactions, skills we utilized, and an analysis of our work at the end. Finally, our field supervisor and faculty liaison comment on what we need to work on. I absolutely see the benefit of this exercise, but it just takes foreeeeever.
That is all for now, I'll post again after I begin teaching to fill you in on what life is like as a full-time student with a part-time job.
Midterms are coming up, and I'm starting to feel the pressure bearing down from school, my field placement, and especially work.
For school I have the obvious pressures of reading and studying for midterms and/or writing papers. So far this hasn't been too bad. For my internship I actually feel a lot of pressure to find clients. UMD requires that I see at minimum 3 clients, and I lead some type of group. Right now I am only seeing 1 client, so I feel the pressure of advertising my services within the field placement...which isn't necessarily bad. Since my future aspiration is to have my own private practice, I may have to get used to advertising for clients. However, part of me expected my field placement to find those clients for me, so this is an extra pressure I didn't plan on. To top that off, I'm struggling with the client I do have because he has so many presenting issues I'd like to address, but it's still early on in our relationship and I don't want to ruin my rapport with him by bringing those issues up. It's frustrating!
For my job as a ballroom dance teacher I'm still in the training phase so it's kind of like I'm enrolled in 2 totally different graduate programs - social work and ballroom. When I go to train for work I take notes, and I have to memorize hundreds of dancing patterns, and I have to memorize our formula on how to sell lessons. It's ALOT to learn, I don't know half of what I should, and the day I supposedly know everything and become a full fledged teacher coincides exactly with my midterms so....goodbye social life! Who knew dancing could be like work?
My current plan is to see how things pan out this semester... If I feel totally overwhelmed at the end of the semester, I'm going to take fewer classes in the Spring, and then take 1 or 2 classes during the summer at the shady grove campus while I work. I figure spreading out the academic load into the summer might help my chances at overall success?...I hope.
Whoa, another big pressure - money! I paid for the whole first semester out of pocket from when I worked in DC for a year. I've been trying like crazy to get some scholarships for next semester because my savings account is not what it used to be, but so far it seems that all the money is reserved for advanced standing (second year) students. I've never taken out a loan before, and I really don't want to start now. I know I still have a little time left to find some money, so here's hoping!
Well, I'm almost finished my first month of graduate school and I'm STILL ALIVE! School feels a lot like undergraduate studies to me, except I only go to each class once a week for 3 hours a pop. This means I have to execute a great amount of will power and self-regulation to make myself sit down and study when I need to. I can really see now that I am expected to teach myself everything, especially in my 2 online classes.
However, I already can tell that the bulk of my learning will come from my field education internship. I am so lucky to be placed with Linkages to Learning, a non-profit agency that places mental health therapists in schools to provide long-term mental health services for students on medicaid or without insurance. This program works mostly in elementary and middle schools because they believe it's best to reach kids at an early age. I'm working at a middle school which I am super excited about because I just read the Twilight book series and I know I'll at least have SOMETHING to break the ice with my clients about!
The internship is great because I have my own supervisor and there are three other social workers in my unit in house whom I can go to with questions. Last week I did my first intake (getting informed consent) with a parent who didn't speak a word of English, and one of the other social workers on staff was able to help me translate. It was an awkward first time, but just that experience of actually doing what I've heard about OVER AND OVER again in undergrad made a huge impact on me. I actually feel like a social worker now.
Tomorrow is my first day with a client, and I can't wait! I don't feel completely comfortable about it yet, but my supervisor says she didn't even feel completely comfortable for years after she was out of school, so that made me feel a little better.
I was worried about school being difficult to balance with my other job as a ballroom dance teacher, and knock on wood, right now It's not too bad. Hopefully I can keep this up through midterms and finals!
My name is Casey, and I am a full-time foundation student at the UMD Shady Grove Campus for FA09. I am at the Shady Grove campus instead of the Baltimore campus this year because school tuition made me broke, and I had to move back home with my dad in Germantown, MD in order to save money. My pride aside, it’s not a bad situation or location because I get to become a part-time ballroom dance instructor in Rockville. That’s right. I’m 23, and I’m a ballroom dance instructor…almost. I just started the 6 weeks of intensive training required before I’m allowed near a student (or any money), so I am struggling to get used to A) my new part-time job, B) my new school, and C) just being a student again.
I feel overwhelmed. I’m ecstatic to be back at school, but there are so many little things to do that persistently consume my free time like buying books, driving to Baltimore for orientations, buying a parking pass, getting a one card, figuring out how to orchestrate an online class, etc. I can’t wait until this new life becomes a routine and I don’t need directions to get everywhere!
I’m not used to the big city school scene. I got my undergraduate degree in Psychology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, which is a public honors college and not affiliated with any religion. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a beautiful small liberal arts college on the St. Mary’s River, and only 1,800 students are enrolled there at a time. I paid $11 dollars to park in Baltimore yesterday for half a day, which I’m pretty sure is what it costs to park at St. Mary’s College for an entire semester.
Despite my immense life changes this past month, I am thrilled to begin a new chapter in my life at the UMD. My undergraduate degree in psychology gave me a breadth of background and theory in the area of mental health, but now I will actually be learning a vocation which will prepare me for the workforce and grant me the tools to help others. I can’t wait!
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