apparently someone was referred to my blog from this link:
http://allthepsychology.com/clinical-psychology/clinical-psychology.php
i don’t know how this happened, but an excerpt from one of my entries ended up underneath the subheading, “what are bloggers saying about clinical psychology?”
unfortunately, i just noticed that the post was marked private.
weird.
location: harbour area halfway house in long beach, ca
days: mondays and wednesdays 10am-6pm, for the whole school year
what: 15 women (most of whom are on parole) who just got out of prison, in the transitory phase to reentry into the community.
ucla is disorganized. everyone else’s placements in our liaison group contacted their students well before orientation last week. apparently my placement didn’t know that we were due to report at 9am this last monday (there are three of us). thankfully, they accepted us anyway. no longer have to split up our time between long beach and watts.
this place is very, very unstructured. us interns are required to be proactive self-starters. i was more than anxious when they told us. because, quite frankly, what the hell am i going to be doing for sixteen hours a week? we don’t provide psychotherapy, but we provide the social services and resources. provide to them transportation to the dmv or to court if need be. help them obtain their social security numbers, birth certificates, find jobs, find a son whom they haven’t seen in over ten years. hang out with them. plan day trips to the museum. lead workshops/presentations. go to 12-step AA meetings to educate ourselves. plan fundraisers because the dept of corrections isn’t giving us jack (you know, whenever they do a head count – they refer to them as “bodies”? not women, persons, humans..but BODIES. they also assume that these women are hostile/volatile – residents are required to check out knives from the front desk in order to COOK).
i was very ambivalent about this placement on monday. i feel a bit more at ease now that i’ve finished a full day today. most of the women i’ve met were very eager to get their lives back on track. they seemed happy to have me there. (“i am here to help you out in any way that i can.”) one woman already told me today that she thought i was going to be a good social worker. she could tell by my personality. sometimes it’s these little comments that make your day. it’s what gets you through to 6 o’clock.
i honestly thought that i’d get placed elsewhere – in geriatrics, DCFS, – anywhere but with this population, since i’d done my undergraduate research on women and prisons. (ucla aims to place 1st year students somewhere they DON’T want to be.) i can already tell that this is going to be rewarding. at harbour house, i am privileged to work on both the macro- (community and programming) and micro- (one-on-one relationships) levels of social welfare. knowing what goes on in the inside so we can work towards fixing it.
and then i forced myself to socialize at happy hour in santa monica afterwards. i’m glad i went. see? christina can make friends!
signing off,
christina (now an msw intern)
