Personal Statement For Catcher In The Rye

I’m Jennifer Viviano and I am working on my graduate degree in English at Suny Oneonta. I already have my associates’ degree in Liberal Arts from Suny Morrisville. I’m currently applying for your program in School Counseling; I had always planned to go into some form of social work for my masters. When people find out I’m getting my degree in English they assume I’m going to be a teacher, and never imagine that I want to go into social work. To me however the transition makes perfect sense. My degree in English has taught me about a rage of behavioral health, through characters in different novels. I learned about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) through The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield. I’ve read a wide rage of novel involving
depression, such as Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson or Impulse by Ellen Hopkins. George R.R Martin summed up the life of an English major with his quote: “I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.” Being an English major has opened my eyes to many different scenarios that people can be experiencing throughout their lifetimes.
My career goal is to work as a high school counselor, but specifically, I want to work with special education students. I would be enthusiastic, however to work with any high school students on a professional level. I’ve always knew that my future would involve helping others, and when I was in high school, I never had councilor I could talk to openly. My guidance counselor made it clear that she was only there for scheduling and nothing more. She told me when it came time to apply for college that I was wasting my time and I wouldn’t get in. After getting accepted to Suny Morrisville and then to Suny Oneonta, I realized that no student planning his or her future should ever feel like I did. That is when I realized I wanted to be a school counselor.
Being a counselor means that I would be helping students plan for their futures: I would help them to schedule their classes, choose college, and plan to enter the work force. I already have some experience with this, from being a resident assistant at Suny Morrisville. The academic advisors at Suny Morrisville were not hands on at all with the students, and this was stressful on the freshman students. I would leave a sign up sheet on my dorm room door for anyone who needed help planning his or her classes for the upcoming semesters. Not only did I help them to plan their schedules, but I also taught them how to do it for themselves.
I have three general areas of interest within the field of social work they are adolescent development, behavioral health, and school-based social work.
I became fascinated in adolescent development after taking an entire class on it. The class taught me a lot of the explanations to why I felt the way I did throughout my own adolescents. Adolescents are at a point in life where the brain has developed fully emotionally, but rationally their brain is not established. So it does not matter how smart the adolescent is they are ruled by their emotions, this is why I want to be there to help them. I want to be a professional person outside of the home that adolescents can come to talk
to.
Behavioral health is a fundamental building block throughout psychology and is needed in any form of social work. Behavioral health goes hand in hand with adolescent development, because every adolescent that I work with is going to be experiencing a different type of behavioral health. Everyone in the school setting comes from a different home life, and will bring distinctive effects into my office. For instance if I am able to work students with special needs they will come in a wide range of behavioral health, some may be mentally impaired, whereas some may only have physical impairments. Each of these elements of the student is part of their behavioral health. Some students I work with will have anxiety, some will have depression, and some will just want someone to talk to. There will be a wide range of students I will be working with.
As a resident assistant I worked with different types of residents, some were coming into college as freshman and completely lost, where as others were graduating and starting their lives.
I spent most of my time in my dorm sitting with my door open so residents would feel comfortable enough to come in and talk with me. I helped my residents however I could rather it meant looking over papers, being a shoulder to cry on, or calling someone for professional help. I also was a New Visions Law student, while I was in high school, and through the program I was allowed to intern in a range of law departments. One of which was the Department of Social Services where I was able to meet some of the children living in the foster system. It broke my heart to hear some of the stories that these children had to tell, some of which were only six years old. When I become a school counselor there are going to be foster children attending school that I will have the ability to work with. I also attended Chenango County drug and alcohol court, where I met teens that had fallen into bad habits. I cannot give specifics of what I witnessed, but what I can say is that the experience left me appreciative for my life. Students are going to come into my office with all different types of behavioral health, so being able to learn more about how to help them is of great interest to
me.
The third area of interest I have is school-based social work, because school is a place that adolescents legally need to attend until they’re sixteen. I am under no insinuation that school is a completely safe place, because I’ve been there. I’ve witnessed bullying, school fights, and I have seen the resent violence on the news. I’m not under the allusion that I would be able to stop all of this, but I feel I should be able to be there to help students to feel safe. I want to be able to have my office door open and be ready for whatever walks into it. I want to be someone who works with students to make them feel safe, and to help them plan for the future. I want to be a school councilor students can trust, and not make them feel like they are a burden. School is required for students to attend this is the perfect place to be able to connect with them. Which is why I want to enter the field of school based social work.