Scattered Notes of a Social Work Student

One of the excellent aspects of going to school in New York City, besides the endless career possibilities and opportunities for internships, is the incredible array of events that could cause a calendar to explode with their constant frequency.

Each year, one of my favorite evenings rolls around the end of September, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens it's massive, beautiful doors for hoards of college students to plow into a massive party within the museum's main corridors. Perhaps a very brave move for a building that houses some of the world's most valuable art and artifacts, yet a beautifully fun night for those of us who still hold College IDs and can squeeze into a costume for a few hours for some sophisticated revelry.

To my grand excitement, this season's theme happened to hinge upon my favorite book: A F.Scott Fitzgerald-themed soiree that centered around the novelist's famed story, "The Great Gatsby". With some very bookish enthusiasm, I scoured thrift shops and bought up the biggest feather headband I could find that would match a rolling strand of pearls and short black flapper dress. In hopes of appearing the 1920s part, I swiped on the ruby red lipstick and nearly ruined my feet in an achingly high pair of heels. The evening was destined for perfection with it's Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan emulations. I boarded the 6-train, decked in full attire, the huge black feather in my hair inviting noticing glances from all sides.

Then I glanced and noticed that my biology midterm was tomorrow. My planner, the always-truthful eye into my week, had lied (which actually means I made a careless mistake when penning in the date of the test).

Which meant I had to make some fast decisions as the train doors shut that would determine if Daisy Buchanan would have her night in West Egg or my real self would crawl into my usual library study space to slave over chromosomes and cell mitosis until the bleak morning hours.

Perhaps it was not the smartest choice; the most intelligent decision when I went on to the event for a few hours before retiring my flapper dress into flannel pajama pants. Yet as I navigated the halls of the Met, blissfully happy and banishing all thoughts of Biology Chapter 4 from my mind, I was reminded of a certain subject that has continued to arise within my social work internship.

For my field, I mentor an immigrant girl who often cancels our sessions with little explanation and a lack of advance notice, sometimes leaving me stranded on the way to the Bronx or stuck with wasted time. But it is not her own volition, perhaps, that is keeping her from attending our meetings. I am certain most 15 year old girls would rather eat peanut butter cookies and Crumbs Cupcakes rather than care for their 4 younger siblings, but due to her prior responsibilities, she is often left debating whether she will fulfill her expected home roles or find some fun in our activities.

So we have begun a new policy, or perhaps, better planning: we plan that it won't happen. We understand that if she says "yes" to a meet-up, it most likely will fall through when the time rolls around. Yet we plan for the best- that when we will have the hours together, we will overfill them with fun as to make up for the moments when she cannot come. As I strolled at the Met, marveling in my favorite night of the year, I thought of my client and our new way of looking at a mentorship. It's not, perhaps, the quantity of how much time we spend together. It's certainly in the quality, finding that bond that works for both of our likes as well as our needs.

And hopefully gives me an A on my biology test.

Recently, I sat with some fellow Social Work undergrads as we discussed our various interests in the field- some of us interested in drug addictions, others ventured towards homelessness, and a few talked about child welfare. We covered an enormous span of career paths and swapped stories about various volunteer assignments.

"My mentee only wants to go to hardware shops," one complained of a recent placement that found her mentoring a high school girl with odd interests. "They put me in charge of game night on MY first night," said another, expressing frustration and fear over showing up at a homeless house to find herself in charge of the evening's activities. I added my account of waiting for my own mentee outside Washington Irvine High School only to have her, in no exaggeration, run in the opposite direction when she saw me while holding hands with her much older boyfriend.

But as we chatted, we all realized the commonalities in our experiences and equally found a similar desire to share with other social work students the lessons we have learned through less-than-perfect placements. I only thought nothing would top a Hebrew client asking my Muslim friend why she wasn't Jewish, but as we shared, I realized that one can find some great truths within the near-terror of certain assignments.

A bit of what we gathered:

- You're there for a reason, not for a responsibility. One friend was told she'd be volunteering in the Financial District at a women's shelter. On her first day, she was reassigned to a station nearly an hour away in the South Bronx that required 2 trains and a bus to find. She began to protest but was awakened with the idea that she was there for the cause, not the convenience. Certainly she would've chosen the lovely skyscraper on Wall Street but found herself in a bricked-up playground outside of Manhattan, but she was certain the violence victims would've rather been somewhere else as well.

- Menial work matters: not just to the organization, but to your own accomplishments. I once kept an internship where my closest form of a client was the copy-repair man I had to call on a near-daily basis. For some reason, the organization required more Xerox-ing than one could ever imagine and I spent actual hours scanning entire books and smearing my hands in ink as I attempted to unstick jams. Yet as I made my employer's coffee runs and made even more copies, I learned that what I did there in the office supply room would greatly affect how they would allow me to advance within the system. By taking the work seriously, I would be trusted with stronger jobs.

- No matter what you're doing, you'll certainly be seeing. Volunteers often complain that they aren't allowed as close of contact with clients as they'd like or feel as though they're making a big enough impact within their selected communities. Yet nearly half of the experience of being a "volunteer" is to see what's going on in the area and accept that as a form of learning. After working at a major New York hospital, I was frustrated for a bit that I was not as entrenched in the lives of the patients as I wanted to be. But all I saw gave me the inspiration to study the populations further.

- You're not a failure if it's bad. After my hospital internship, I wanted to curl up in a ball and weep as I returned nearly every day. If I had not fully helped a client as I would've liked to, I would've seen some absolutely horrible sights within the clinic setting. Yet I would have never been able to learn that medical social work was not the place for me from a textbook.

- Payment always comes in full. Sure, we're all working for no paycheck, yet in social work volunteerism, there's never a doubt that you won't be totally fulfilled by some aspect of the job.

I will soon be entering my second semester of sophomore year of social work, and as I mangle my way through degree requirements and fulfilling credits, a certain aspect has continued to arise within my quest for a successful diploma.

I started this August as an excited Arabic student within NYU's Middle Eastern Studies department, fresh from a summer spent in Egypt and a very small but decently working knowledge of the language. Yet two months into the semester, I found myself in a sticky situation requiring me to withdraw as well as nearly drowning in a terrible confusion. But despite my own issues with the class, my entire degree path changed as I realized I would no longer graduate with a Minor in Arabic, nor any university-level foreign language training. As I contemplated winter sessions and summer classes, I was troubled by the question if second dialects should be a necessity for social workers.

Most of my friends are fluent in Spanish, and despite the fact that I was once conversational in French, my own confidence in my chatting ability is very limited. I suppose I could tell a client they had a pretty dress in the Parisian tongue or could ask them if they needed to go right or left in Arabic, yet when it comes to the ease of speaking another language, I am lost.

I suppose Social Workers are at a very different level when it comes to language proficiency - we do not need to merely understand the grammatical points and structures, we need proper instruction in the conversational nuances and subtleties that would be exhibited by possible clients. So while I can order a baguette in French, I cannot exactly deal with a divorcing couple or elder with dimensia.

I have the desire to work with international populations, preferably those of Middle Eastern or African descent. So as I plot my course outline and future career, I am in constant flux of how important a second or third tongue might be within my plans.
I searched a bit of the extensive, online NYU library collection for resources on bilingual social work and found some information that varied greatly with its answers. So for now, I suppose a great deal is just lost in translation.

Which is a problem I definitely hope does not arise in practice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O00-lLxifNQ

Midterm week leaves one with a lack of eloquence or anything articulate to say - when one's head has been poured into a Biology book or sat with the same six sentences attempting to revise a final draft for a paper, a decent amount of intelligence exits the brain. Your diet switches to whatever the Bobst Library vending machine will give you with a Campus Cash swipe and you eat peanut M&M's when you're feeling healthy because they have more protein than the Skittles you've subsisted on in past days. Instead of a bed, you rely on the Lower Level couches in Bobst and hunt for the soft chairs in the Washington Square Starbucks like a lion searching for prey. You decide to block Facebook from your browser after you waste forty-five minutes clicking through photos of your old roommate's summer vacation instead of reading your notes on interviewing clients. You wonder if there is life outside of the anatomical photos in your biology book. As you hunker down in the Kimmel Center's excellent 7th floor study lounges, you look at the massive views of the Empire State building and wonder if you too will ever be able to walk amongst those of this world who have concerns that do not include meiosis and mitosis.

If you cannot tell, midterm week has given me my usual state of near-exam-time psychosis, yet as I culminate my sophomore fall semester deadlines, I have learned a few lessons about how to survive when you have more due dates than days in the week.

Lesson 1: McNally Jackson in Soho is probably the most productive place to pound out a paper. It's a quiet neighborhood, there is always space available, and you are in a room full of very interesting books that inspire you to type out a decent publication rather than rambling on while watching Gossip Girl in another window on your laptop.

Lesson 2: Themed music, however corny, can be extremely productive. I want to work with refugees and am endlessly inspired by the stories and strength of the population I am most interested in, Northeastern Africans. So it is a little known secret that I like to play some of my favorite musicians from that area when I am working on an ethnographic paper or plowing through a chapter on the Nervous System - even if it is not related to the assignment, it reminds me what I am working for.

Lesson 3: Sleep - as social workers, we learn the constant lesson of what happens to those who do not rest as much as they should and we hear about the dangerous toll that exhaustion takes on a body, yet we fail in actually doing it ourselves. But despite the fact that one is positive they will perform better if they stay awake till five AM and take an exam at 8 AM, statistics and personal experience show that passing out on your desk is not a key factor in passing a test.

Lesson 4: Work hard, then work a little harder. A good friend in Social Work informed me of this simple mantra she keeps typed into her phone and I am often reminded of it as I plan out my "study breaks" during midterm week. I am prone to rewarding myself for work I probably have not completed, such as taking an hour long trip to my favorite bakery (Milk Bar on 3rd) for cookies when I have only done about ten questions for a class. So now, when the craving for Corn Flake Marshmallow cookies arises, I tack on 30 extra minutes of studying before I allow myself to dig in.

Lesson 5: Don't panic. Panic is what makes you forget your #2 pencils when you enter a bubble-sheet only exam and panic is what pushes you to lose any sense of joy during the week.

Good luck!