Reflection On Field Placement

Field Journal 4
Breyanna Hiebert
University of British Columbia As we are winding down the semester and heading toward a new year, I find myself thinking about how the school year and field placement have been so far and how I want to improve my experiences next year. In regards to my field placement, I am satisfied, but not enthralled with the impact I have been making so far. Further, at this point in time, I am half way to the number of hours I need to complete before the end of third year. Seeing clients and helping them navigate systems and proving them with support is everything I hoped it to be. When clients have simple issues or tasks that I can easily help them with, my work is very rewarding. However, housing and finances are a major issue for most of my clients and with the housing market right now, it can be a very discouraging process. Additionally, some clients are coming in with issues that are much above my skill level and scope,

There has been some discussion with my supervisors on how to better fill my time at the placement, but unfortunately, there has been some disagreement on how to do so. Megan and I have one direct supervisor who is evaluating us, but we also have another supervisor that works in our program. Our direct supervisor has been very approachable in allowing us some flexibility; he mentioned that we could become involved with some of the programming they put on for youth in high schools, in addition to revamping the volunteer training for our program from a social work perspective. Our other supervisor seems content filling our time with menial tasks that do not further our social work learning goals but achieve administrative work for the department. While I am flexible to doing some administrative work, it sounds like these tasks could equal up to five or six hours per