First off, so sorry for the recent lack of entries. I didn't feel much a reason to update over winter break though, since I was home for most of it and not doing much exciting. Plus I got to see most of you during that time anyway!
Now that second semester is in full swing, I thought it was time to update. This is going to be fairly brief, as I'm getting ready to head to bed soon (yes, it's 9:00... I had a long day!) But hopefully I'll update again in the next couple of days.
I'm taking four classes again this semester, plus my field seminar. Field seminar, however, is a joke because we only meet every other week for 45 minutes. We're supposed to discuss what's going on in our field placements, etc., but that amount of time gives us little opportunity to get much accomplished. When I was completing my BSW at UW-Madison, our field seminars met every single week for 2 hours, and we were really able to process and expand upon what we were learning in our field placements. I was pretty annoyed when I discovered how it works here at the U. It ends up just feeling like a waste of time.
However, my four "real" classes are all going quite well. I'm much more satisfied than I was last semester, which is great. My first class of the week is on Wednesday evenings from 5:00-7:00. That class is called "Working with Immigrant Populations." The thing that I really enjoy about this class so far is that almost every week we have a guest speaker for the first half of class. Last week it was a man that worked with refugees at a resettlement agency. He talked all about the resettlement process and what refugees have to go through prior to and after coming to the U.S. I feel like in a place such as the Twin Cities, home to so many immigrant and refugee populations, a class like this is necessary for any social worker.
Thursday I have class from 8:30-11:30 and 1:55-4:55. The first class of the day is "Interventions with Families." That class is basically about teaching us how to do family therapy, which is quite useful. We'll be learning various different models of family therapy and then practicing them intensively in role play situations. I really like the instructor, Judy Hoy. She's a community faculty member and has her own practice. She's been doing family therapy for years and years, and just has a wealth of stories to share.
The second class of the day is my policy class, which was a requirement. There were a couple of policy classes to choose from (health & mental health policy, global policy, etc.), and I chose family and child welfare policy. I chose this first of all because my focus is in the area of children and families, and also because Mira took the class last year with the same instructor and highly recommended it. The instructor, Tammy Kincaid, worked for years and years in the area of child welfare and is now the director of human services in Pierce County, Wisconsin (just across the border). She's extremely knowledgeable about policy.
My last class of the week is on Fridays from 11:45-1:40 and is entitled "Mood Disorders: New Directions in Clinical Care." It obviously focuses on mood disorders, including depression and bipolar disorder. I thought it would be a very valuable class to take since so many people suffer from mood disorders, and since bipolar disorder is "the ADHD of the new millennium", with ridiculous numbers of very young children being given the diagnosis and being put on dangerous atypical antipsychotic medications that have not been tested in children. The class will be looking at models of assessment and intervention for clients with mood disorders. We'll be learning about cognitive-behavioral therapy, family therapy and pharmacological treatments. We'll also learn about cultural, class, race, gender, age differences in treating and identifying mood disorders. Again, I really like the instructor for the course, Mark Meier. He's another community faculty. He's a licensed clinical social worker as well as the CEO of Creative Workplace Solutions, a consulting firm dedicated to raising awareness about depression.
So that's a quick summary of my course load for the semester. In the very near future (I would say tomorrow, but I don't want to make any promises) I will update with some info about what I'm doing at Wellstone for the second half of the year.
Love to all!
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