Conference Fun!

Collo hours: 4

In looking ahead to my future career goals, I attended the recent Social Work Professional Development Conference held on April 14th. The career fair was huge with a large varieties of places represented....I had no idea that the Social Security Administration hires people with a Psych degree! Even though I am majoring in Psychology instead of Social Work for my bachelors degree, I plan to get a masters in either social work or counseling as becoming an LCSW or LPC is the quickest way to do face-to-face work with people without having to get a doctorate degree. The various workshops offered a lot of great info... The preparing for Social Work Licensure laid out the specifics on Tennessee requirements, and the workshop about Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy talked about how many different disorders can be helped using this model.
I want to pursue a career focus in Trauma, helping people recover after a traumatic event.

Survey Time

As requested, I completed the SAIs to gain Collo class time. Give me that hard earned hour Dr. Heddon!

More Talking

This semester has been brutal! Interestingly enough, the classes I am least excited about always turn out to be really good and the opposite holds true for the ones I am looking forward to. This semester those classes were Philosophy as Conversion and Behavioral Neuroscience. I was dragging my feet about the philosophy class thinking it would suck. However, it turned out to be a great class. Most of the assignments were interesting and the material got me thinking. Conversely, I expected Behavioral Neuroscience to be interesting, but it was the worst class I have had while in college. It was an online course that turned out to be an exercise in memorizing a 600 page book and speed testing instead of actually learning something! There was literally no supplemental materials provided. The only grades came from 16 quizzes and 4 exams which were timed to give exactly 1 minute per question and using notes or the book was prohibited. The exams covered 3 chapters (120-140 pages each) and there was no way to narrow the scope of material. Also, there was zero feedback. If you missed questions on a quiz or exam, you never knew which one. How are we supposed to learn if we don't know what we missed?

After struggling through the first few quizzes and Exam #1, I message the professor for help and received a rude unhelpful response. So, to boost my study skills, I decided to go to Dr. Dula's "How to Study" seminar. Again, I found it interesting and helpful. Even though I am a good student who thought I was an effective studier. However, this seminar made a lot of practical sense and has helped me become a better student. I found the test strategies extremely helpful. The most important tips I came away with are:

1. Don't highlight in the book, but rather write out the important info on another sheet of paper to help consolidation to memory.
2. Prime your brain of important info about reading it before bed and again right before the test.
3. Study by paragraph instead of by chapter.

I'm glad I went as this seminar helped me improve my confidence and pull an A in a really difficult class.

Talk Tastic

In an effort to get ready for Grad School and beyond, I decided to check out Dr. Chris Dula's seminar on Career Planning. Dr. Dula is an interesting person and his seminars are never boring. What I most like about him is his obvious desire to help students. As promised the seminar did enlighten me on a few points.....

1. The importance of taking the GRE several times.
2. The different types of GRE.
3. The importance of doing activities to stand out among other applications.
4.  The available campus resources for exploring careers.

All-in-all, it was a well spent hour!