Thursday, November 15, 2012

Contemplation: Graduate School

Upon completion of this upcoming Spring quarter, I'll be done my BA Social Work program at CSULA. Time has been approaching to start thinking about a masters program, but this graduate program ordeal has been boggling my mind for weeks. It's been making my eyebrows look like >:( for so long, they almost hurt. I had originally intended on getting a Masters in Social Work, but throughout my studies, I have begun to wonder:

Do I still want to study Social Work for Graduate School? Taking classes at this institution had been mostly a negative experience for me, in a sense where I felt rather dumb and bored during class. In the classes I didn't feel challenged to learn, everything taught was very repetitive. These feelings of course may be due to my own lack of diving into the texts as much as I should have, not getting more involved during class, or it may simply be due to the professors who taught the class. Something tells me that it may have been the program, maybe I didn't fit with it well? If the classes taught at other colleges are the same as the ones at my school, I definitely don't think I want to study it for my masters. Don't misunderstand though please, this doesn't mean that I don't have a passion for helping people make a change in their lives, that's still what I want to do as a career, help! The question is whether Social Work is the career choice. I love what the major lets you do, don't enjoy studying it so far, besides a few aspects of it.

There are a few other educational studies that I am looking into. The main one is the Masters in Public Policy Program. Throughout my SW studies, I have always looked through the lens of the big, macro perspective in helping people, and with an MPP you can definitely help on the big scale, since it's about policies. :O Then the question becomes, "Would you be able to give up counseling and the various social services services that a MSW would allow you to do, such as medical SW, clinical counseling, etc?" Again, I still want to be a disaster work volunteer in my elderly years, and with an MSW you can actually work on public policy, but not in such a wide range as the MPP program allows.

Although my classes seemed like a drag, my internship has been such a great, rewarding experience since I get to practice social work skills in communicating with people who are striving for improvement in their lives.


You know, something this important needs time to think about. 
Game Plan: Being an easily stressed out, worried person, I'm going to try relaxing and thinking it over, keeping an eye on things I enjoy and don't enjoy doing. I'll go over all of my educational interests until it narrows down. 

Next week my husband and I are planning to attend an MPP informational session, so things should clear up from there. Giving myself a year to think about graduate school has taken a big burden off of my shoulders, allowing time for me to investigate and discover what career I want to have in my future years. My real goal is again to be a good mother in the future, but at the same time I really want to be able to help with the finance and one day support my parents (I love mum & dad) with a career that I love. There are other things that I would love to study though, but not as a career.

If you can tell, I'm quite in a educationally mental mess, but I'm determined to figure this out. I can't wait to figure it out.

Sunshine:

HUSBAND: Until recently I had seen Social Work in a dark light because of my bad experiences with the classes. After talking to my husband about my feelings toward the major (he being a psychology major) I had come to see it as I had originally saw it before coming to CSULA, a career of hope! It feels so nice to see the Social Work career positively. 

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