A glimpse into my life

It is March 24th, 2:22am

I finished writing a reflective essay for my Child Welfare class on an article about a man who wanted to create “pure” family bloodlines and raped five of his daughters, resulting in six pregnancies, between the mid-1980’s until 2002. The girls were also beat with “wooden boards and steel-toed boots…. and minor transgressions often were punished by the withholding of food.”

After that I worked on the outline for our Community Project. My group is doing our project on the homeless situation in Cache Valley. We had to distribute surveys all around town to community leaders, compile and analyze the data, set it up into power-points, add a few good quotes from the surveys, etc. We have to present our project to the class on the 29th, but I decided I might as well enter the Student Showcase as well.

The student showcase is "an annual symposium to showcase outstanding work done by students on research, scholarly, and creative projects." I'm in a group of 3 and we have 12 minutes for our oral presentation. It's a pretty big deal (there are 92 abstracts this year, if you want to look at our abstract click here and go to page 87. There are big fancy invitations to send out, but I decided not to go that direction. After all, it's only a 15 minute time slot.

I'm also working on statistics for out Community Profile. Each group was assigned a different portion of the valley (i.e. census statistics, community organizations, social organizations, etc.) so that, as a Social Worker, we'd know what the community looks like & what resources we have to offer our clients. It's a HUGE project, but is incredibly helpful in teaching us how to get to know our community from a Social Workers eyes.

I'm in the process of working on a project for a different class where we have to set up a focus group. We chose to do it for 16-18 year old females dealing with anger management in a school setting. I'm glad there are enough of us that I only have to do one session... but I have to do the outline, come up with handouts and information to fill a whole hour... I'm not looking forward to presenting this one in class.

In other news; I like to sit near the back in all my classes. Not because I'm a slacker, but because I like to see everything... and it is easier for me to ignore noise in front of me than behind me.

Anyway, I don't comment in class that much and don't spend a lot of time chatting it up with some of my professors like some of the other kids do.

Well, Monday I was working on a take home quiz with some boys from my class and we were stuck between two different answers.... we had a man's case notes and we were supposed to diagnose him. We were stuck between Paranoid Type or Residual Type of Schizophrenia. I was tired of back & forth and explaining and what not so I called Dr. K on his office phone. It wasn't his office hour so I wasn't expecting him to answer, and when he did I was rather surprised. I explained Shane, Jarrad & I were working on the quiz and that we were stuck between Paranoid or Residual... I was expecting him to ask me questions and help me work through the problem, but he was actually quite snippish and only asked me a few questions and said "well there's your answer" when I said Paranoid the first time... then hung up. Later that afternoon in class he made a big deal of apologizing to me, in front of the ENTIRE class, saying that he hadn't meant to seem rude but it was his lunch break and he was literally on his way out the door when his office phone rang so he didn't have a lot of time to answer me, and he normally would have walked through the problem with me.

Today I went to Dr. A's office to drop something off and she said "Oh Alisha, I actually needed to talk to you." She told me the outline of the project we'd turned in recently wasn't very good and she was disappointed in my performance & knew I could do better (she gave me a 38/45) and showed me what was wrong with it, etc.... however everything wrong was actually something she hadn't told anyone in the class about, so she took blame for that, and the rest was actually another group members portion of the project that had been expanded from mine. I about panicked, but it turned out mine was fine and it was someone else's portion that was wrong... because we're in a group we all share the same grade, so we all need to work on helping the member fix that portion together.

While I was sitting there talking to Dr. A, Dr. Browne came in and when he realized Dr. A was busy he went to leave. However, he realized it was me in the office and began chatting with me. Asked how Spring Break was, did I like the movie he lent me, etc...

The point is this; I didn't think I really mattered in the program and was just another body in the crowd but being apologized to in front of an entire class, having a professor chat with me while I'm in a meeting with another professor, and having another one notice my work isn't quite up to my normal standard helps me realize while I am in a crowd, I'm still an individual... and people notice.

It's 3:04am now. Not that you want to know, but my day goes as follows;

10:30-11:20 Statistics Recitation

11:00-12:20 Studying in the Library

12:30-1:20 Choir

1:00-2:00 BINGO at Bear River House OR

1:30-2:20 Studying in the Library w/ Erica

2:30-5:00 Child Welfare

5:00-11:00 Work with Sam, Shelby & Jimmy

#1 perk of the day; I've missed my boys and am excited to see them!! I painted their bathroom last week and need to do some touch ups while I'm there...

#2 perk of the day; the name of the day at Spoon Me is Alisha!!! Free frozen yogurt!!! Yahoo!! However, if the boys don't want to go I'll probably have to miss out :(

If you've never had Spoon My you are TRULY missing out. Click here to see if there's one near you!!!!

Well, it's 3:20 now and I have to have my contacts in their cool bubbly solution for at least 6 hours so I've got to get them in the container otherwise they'll burn so bad when I put them in tomorrow!!!

Good night, love you, sweet dreams.