Hello all,

The past month flew by. I can’t believe my Spring Break, Easter and April 1 have come and gone already. It all seems to have come and gone so fast. I know that Drew has written about some of our outings, but I will give you a little update on what’s been happening in my life.

According to my day planner (which has come in very handy this past month) March started out with a placement planning fair. This event is set up to help first year social work students, like myself, pick out where they would like to intern in their second year of school. I attended this event happily as it gave me a day off from my current internship (which I do enjoy, but who doesn’t relish a day off from work?). The event marked the start of my month of trying to decide what I am going to be doing with an MSW. At the fair I was able to talk to some places that looked interesting to me, but unfortunately, I left there feeling more confused than enlightened.

I was trying to decide between working with either Families Youth and Children or Aging populations. I am currently in an internship where I work with the Aging population and I like it very much. But, I wasn’t sure if I stayed with the Aging population in my second year if I would be “pigeon-holed” into always working with this population. (And, anyone who has seen me in New York knows I really don’t like anything that has to do with pigeons.) So, I wanted to try something different, but there was a great internship opportunity within the field of aging that looked really appealing to me too. I just really could not make up my mind.

I had to go to interviews and fill out a bunch of forms and get my decision into the school by April 3rd. So, while I was going back and forth about what I wanted to do, (according to my day planner) I also wrote several papers and had a midterm, worked on group projects, went to a Hipster beach party, turned 25, saw a Knick’s game and a show about Rock n Roll, had spring break and decorated some easter eggs. Oh and (thanks to Drew) watched lots and lots and lots of basketball.

For some reason, in the end, I decided that an internship in the field of aging was the best way to go for me. I turned in the sheet on Thursday. I cannot really say what it was that made me choose population of aging, but something was just telling me to go in that direction.

Then on Friday I went to a seminar held by the Consortium of New York Geriatric Educational Seminars. I had signed up for this event in the beginning of March and had kind of forgotten about it until Friday morning when I saw (thanks to my trusty planner) I was going there instead of my internship. I didn’t know what was in store for me at this seminar, but again, I was happy to get out of a day at my internship. Happily, unlike my event at the beginning of March, at the end of this event I came out very much less confused and more enlightened.

The seminar focused on health promotion and culturally appropriate care with older adults. There were several speakers who are at the tops of their fields in working with older adults. I learned about the use of complimentary and alternative methods such as aroma therapy, massage therapy and use of herbal medicines. The final two speakers impressed me the most. One spoke about the use of music therapy and showed many amazing videos that showed the power of music for people who are physically and cognitively impaired (A woman who can only speak the word “Yes” is able to sing all of “Day-O”. Its incredible.). And the final speaker shared her own life story with a room full of strangers to showcase the power of life review therapy.

Then, yesterday I was doing reading for one of my classes. For the first time this year, one of my classes is actually focusing on the aging population. I was excited about this because in none of my other classes has aging been focused on and, as a result, many of the things I have learned have not directly applied to the work I am doing. The piece was from the New Yorker and described the aging process in a way that really spoke to me. The last line of the article, is a quote from an older gentleman driving in his car in after dusk. “The night is lovely, isn’t it?” I read this line and thought, “Okay, I know what I am supposed to do.”

The night of life can be a beautiful and fulfilling time, and if I can help in any way make people’s night times a little more lovely, that is something that I am very excited to do. I still don’t know what made me decide to do an aging internship before I had these two experiences. It’s like I knew what I was supposed to do before I realized it. But once I realized it, I must say, it was a really good feeling.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Manhattan. 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.