This past week marked the beginning of my graduate school career. I am not sure what that means just yet, and thats a little frightening and exciting. As a graduate social work student I will have two days of classes and three days of field placement, where I will actually be in a social work setting doing social work things. I don’t know how I am supposed to know what these social work things are as that is what I am going to school for, but I guess we will see.

The first two weeks of school I do not have to go to my field placement, so I just have the two days of classes to worry about. On Wednesdays I have a class called Foundations of Social Work Practice in the morning and Social Welfare Policy in the afternoons. This Wednesday my Foundations professor brought in coffee and bagels from Dunkin’ Donuts. It was a great way to start my first day back in school.

In my policy class my professor did not bring us any food, so that was not as cool, but he seems to be the “absent minded professor” type, which is kind of cool. It was apparent from the start of class that he is an incredibly intelligent guy, and while this is nice, it is somewhat disconcerting also as he knows so much, his lectures are a bit disjointed.

I am not sure what he taught us in the first class, but I know I heard things about his knee surgery, the AARP, losing papers on a subway, an important financial firm using its pull to get young African American males good jobs, health care, social security, testifying in front of congress, and that he has paid his taxes. So, I think it will be a very interesting class.

After class on Wednesday, a friend of mine from my orientation group, Alli, and I headed downtown to do a little shopping and eat, in her words, “the best pizza in the city.” We hopped on the one train and headed south. As Alli is a native New Yorker she easily navigated our way to an Urban Outfitters where she was hoping to spend her allotted “Back to School” budget. I do not usually frequent the store, and now I know why. That place is too trendy for me. I am not a big fan of spending 80 bucks to get a sweater that looks like I found it at Savers.

So after we did not find anything shopping and our other friend from our orientation group met up with us, we headed to Joe’s Pizza. I bought a slice with fresh mozzarella. We stepped outside of the pizza shop, which was blaring cher music and sat down at a bench at a park across the way. While the pizza was quite good, I can’t say it was the best in the city, so I am still looking.

On Thursdays for the first half of the semester, I do not have class until 2:00 pm. So I ran some errands in the morning and went to my first class Human Behavior and the Social Environment or HBSE (and according to everyone who goes here it is pronounced hub-see). This class is going to teach us how to look at a problem and understand it before we try to fix it. In our first class we talked a lot about green apples being sour.

I couldn’t really pay attention as I had drank way too much water before class… Right after that class (and a trip to the bathroom) I went to my final class of the week, Seminar in Professional Identity. It is taught by a doctoral student and the class only has about 12 people in it. After we introduced ourselves (as we had all done in every other class this week) the teacher gave a quick lecture on what social worker can do and then let us go an hour early. I am pretty sure this will be my easiest class this semester.

So that’s a brief on my classes this semester. Oh, and in each class I was assigned 100-200 pages of reading per week. I have a feeling I won’t have much of a life for the next two years….

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Columbia, Food, Manhattan, NYC Places. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.