Blog #1

Hi, I'm Megan. I graduated from UT Austin in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. I also have a Certificate in European Studies which means I took too many German classes in college. Deutschland Uber Alles. Just kidding, but really if you can get past the obsession with rules, purity and self-loathing it's a wonderful country.

I'm a second year clinical student and I'm interested in mental health, psychological disorders, counseling and psychotherapy. I've worked, interned, and volunteered at a psychiatric hospital, counseling clinics, a sex education program, and a science lab full of snakes and spiders where people studied anxiety disorders. I love psychology and have made many a buck volunteering to be experimented on by the fine researchers at UT's Psychology Department during my time in undergrad.

My first year field placement was at Akins High School ~ Student Support Services. I started co-facilitating a few different support groups pretty early in my internship, so I think I had a lot more opportunities to work with groups than other students in my year. For most of my time at Akins I facilitated or co-facilitated two closed groups each week. The groups took place during school hours and had about 3-12 students depending on the group. The groups were support and psychoeducational in nature and included: Anger Management, managing anxiety and depression, LGBTQ support, and healthy relationships. I liked planning and running most of the groups, especially the depression and anxiety one because of the heavy emphasis on mental health.

Because of my experiences I don't have much fear about working with groups of teenagers. I'm still nervous about working with adults or children in groups (or individually) because I've never done that before. I do find individual work more nerve-wracking than group work, because I feel like there's more pressure on me. I find groups to be more laid back than individual sessions, at least in my limited experience. I hope to learn more tools and strategies for working with groups and individuals, and I'm excited to read the Yalom book. I have an old edition from the '70s that I picked up at Half Price Books once on a whim (because that's the kind of person I am). I'm sure I will be comparing editions and snickering at outdated stuff because I am incredible nerd and that's the sort of thing I do for fun.

On the reading...

It appears that most of the participants chose to study group work because they tried it and enjoyed it or felt like they were good at it. That's always the best reason to learn something useful, right? It's also good to feel like you're good at something. I imagine a lot of the study participants expected their groups to go horribly, and were surprised at skills they didn't know they had. That was my experience at Akins.

A secondary reason appears to be because of the career benefits of having advanced group work skills. The article's introduction discusses the growing emphasis on group work in today's budget-limited world, and social work education's concurrent shift toward generalist education with less advanced instruction in group work or other areas. This has apparently led to less student's graduating with advanced study of group work at a time when we need practitioners with those skills more than ever. Quite the conundrum, but certainly not the only problem with social work education in North America. I'm not quite sold on the "generalist" education. I feel like I've learned a little of everything, but I still know nothing. I wish we had more opportunities for advanced study of group work (and other specializations).

I think this implies that social work schools should give students more opportunities to experience group work (or force them to). I think a lot of people would find that if they try it, they'll like it. Making students do group work during first field like UT does (all CSWE accredited school's might require it for all I know) is a good strategy. I think the idea of group work puts off a lot of people because it feels more like public speaking than casework or individual therapy, and almost everyone is afraid of public speaking. I just had to be forced to do groups a few times before it quit being scary and started being fun.

I like working with groups and individuals. I get bored easily so I hope I get to do lots of both in my career as a therapist.