Papers, papers, papers...

This past week has been very writing intensive. Social work classes have always been more paper heavy than exam focused, but besides finals week I usually don't have a lot due all at once. Last week though... First, I had a paper due on Sunday by noon. Technically I didn't have to turn it in until a couple of weeks later, but it's the first part of a two-part paper and if I wait to turn it in later then the entire thing is due at one time. If we turn the first part in early, our instructor said that she would give us feedback on it so we can make possible revisions. This paper was for my advanced policy class on family and child welfare policy. For the first part of the paper we have to pick a problem statement related to children or families and write a review on the literature. Basically, what is the problem, why is it a problem?, what social, environmental and biological factors influence the problem? The second part of the paper, due later in March, will be exploring two different programs/policies that address the problem and evaluating them.

The problem statement that I chose was on childhood obesity. With the rates having more or less tripled over the past 30 years and Michelle Obama starting her first big initiative on the issue, it's definitely something that I knew I'd be able to find a lot of research on. However, I wasn't thinking about the fact that many of the consequences of childhood obesity are health-related. So to review the literature on the medical consequences of childhood obesity, I had to read all kinds of articles from medical journals that took me quite a bit of time to get through, mostly because I had to look up a lot of words. I'm a social worker -- I have no idea what C-reactive protein is or what "biliary excretion of cholesterol" means! However, once I learned a lot of the most common conditions and terms, I was able to get through things much quicker, and also became a pro at reading abstracts, introductions and then skimming down to the results and discussion parts of research articles. Because I'm big on corroborating -- I'm not going to write that childhood obesity can cause precocious puberty unless I can cite more than one piece of literature -- I had to read a lot of what was basically the same thing over and over. However, now I feel a whole lot smarter. I wanted to tell my instructor that she's lucky she now has a very comprehensive overview of the consequences of childhood obesity that has been translated into understandable language! I also looked at the social and economic costs as well as the different possible causes or influences. It was quite the paper and I was up until 3:30 AM last Saturday finishing it. Haven't been up that late finishing a paper since undergrad.

I felt like I had barely finished that paper when it was time for me to write the next one. I had another paper due on Wednesday for my working with immigrants class. This paper was very similar to the other one, in that it was meant to be a lit review on a problem statement. Only this problem statement had to do with a problem in the delivery process of social services to one or more immigrants/refugee groups, and unlike the 10-15 pages that my last paper was, this only had to be 5-6 pages. I had gathered my research already, but hadn't read through any of it yet and hadn't started writing. Tuesdays are my days off, so I had planned to spend all day working on it. My initial plan was to write about the lack of cultural competency in completing mental health screenings with immigrants and refugees. I read a few articles Tuesday morning, went to the gym, ate lunch, then settled myself into my favorite neighborhood coffee shop.

I started to get increasingly frustrated with the lack of research and finally realized that my problem statement was much, much too broad. So I decided to narrow it down, but this meant that I had to do all new research. Since I already have quite a bit of knowledge on the Somali community thanks to my diversity project from last semester, I decided to make my problem statement on the under-identification of mental health needs among Somali children. I was surprisingly able to find quite a bit of research on Somali mental health, and many of the research articles actually focused on the Somali community in Minnesota. I found some fascinating articles, but unfortunately once the time came for me to go home and get ready to leave for tutoring, I had just finished reading and hadn't even begun writing.

I got home from tutoring around 7:20 and immediately got to work, finishing the paper at just about 11:30. In the paper I reviewed the history of the Somali community, explored the mental health concerns and cultural considerations relating to the population, and explained the need for more accurate mental health screenings of Somali youth. I think it turned out to be a very interesting paper, and I got to write about one of my main areas of interest, which is treatment of trauma and intergenerational trauma transmission. Perhaps I'll even post the paper on here, if people are interested.

So finally I got to have a break from papers, although then it was time for me to study for a quiz in my Friday mood disorders class. There's never a break in the life of a student! At least this semester, the papers that I'm writing actually make me feel as though I'm learning something. That always makes for a nice change!