Personal Reflection Paper

In this paper I plan to briefly review what happened during the counseling demonstration. Next, I will discuss two basic counseling skills that I believe I used well, and one that I struggled with. Finally, I will discuss the next steps I will take in order to improve my counseling skills.

New Zealand is occasionally described as a “country of immigrants” mainly for the reason that most of the people who are living here came from a different place.(Jones 2008). Migrating to a different country is already a challenge, starting a business and managing people in diverse cultures would be much more. It is everyone’s dream to be an entrepreneur. Success stories like Bill Gallagher in the 1930s where he got an idea from watching his horse scratching itself from the family car and thus becoming the foundation of Gallagher Power Fencing Company are always in our minds. (Derby 2017). The vision is to have the perfect business but in order to achieve this one has to face the tasks of having to manage people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Throughout the entirety of this project I was able to take a step back and look at myself as a future professional in the fitness industry, and I was also able to help a person achieve something that he had been wanting to do for a long time. This project provided me with an outlet to be able to work one on one with a client in something other than just the workouts. For the entirety of my time in my fitness career I have been working on creating workouts that would challenge athletes physically, improve their athletic performance, and also reduce the risk of injury. Yet this project allowed me to look at a side of fitness that I had neglected up to this point. Overall it provided a chance for me to switch up my mindset on things and it really opened up my eyes to a whole different way of thinking when it comes to fitness, and it also provided very meaningful information that I can use and implement in my career moving forward.

I have had the opportunity to meet people of many different backgrounds. In this paper, I will talk about two individuals with whom I had the pleasure of working with as a case manager at a behavioral health agency in the Greater New Orleans area. Before I go into detail about my experiences, I think it would be important to identify myself. I am a black female, in my early twenties who identifies as heterosexual. I also do not have any mental or physical challenges and grew up an upper middle-class family. Working in a diverse community has impacted my perspectives of people and groups in a positive way that has allowed me to be more aware and respectful of people that are different than me.

I am now approaching the conclusion of my college career and starting to adjust to work life. This is a period of self-reflection and an attempt to put everything I learned into perspective. During this period of my life, I have been constantly thinking and contemplating my future. I feel very anxious yet nervous during this time while I am adjusting to this new stage of my life. When I was in High school my life was very structured, because I could be very dependent on peoples help and I obviously still lived with my family. When I went to college, I had to break away from that feeling of dependency and start the adjusting to adulthood. In college there was more responsibility and I started to become more independent. This was a crucial step in my life but choosing a career is going to be an even bigger step. It is a bigger step because; I have to start structuring my career goals and family goal for the future. At this moment all I can think about is my career, and how I can I keep improving myself for work life.

Communication disorders are non-discriminatory. They can affect any person or family at any time. I first became connected to Speech-Language Pathology when my cousin, who experienced a bilateral stroke at birth, was told she would never function on her own. With the help of her clinician’s continuous support, she has made remarkable strides. Many years later after my grandfather suffered heart failure and a tracheostomy, I observed how his SLP showed compassion and care in his rehabilitation and health. Seeing the positive impact these professionals had on my family, coupled with my drive to have my career revolve around helping others, fueled my desire to follow this path.

I am Ethiopian. I was born and raised in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia. I belong to the Ethiopian community, not only in Ethiopia but also here in America. Finding Ethiopian friends who share the same interests as me, understand our culture, fluent in our languages, and plan on returning back to Ethiopia someday, has always been a struggle for me. Most of the Ethiopians who I meet are Americanized. When I was studying at Northern Illinois university, I was blessed to have a small circle of Ethiopians who grew up there. Spending time with them made me feel secure like I actually belonged. Lucky for me, I am also a part of the African community. There are 54 countries in Africa; however, there is an unbreakable bond amongst Africans around the world. We share the same identity and have the utmost love and respect for our continent and the people living there.

Its easy to forget the significance of independence and how different our lives would be without it. I had the opportunity to meet a young woman, who was in the middle of the hardest time of her life. She had just had all four of her extremities amputated as the result of sepsis, due to rejected pregnancy complications. After spending three helpless months pinned to a hospital bed, she was brought to the semi-acute hospital I was shadowing, where I saw her every day for four weeks. Her initial physical impairments, stoping her from lifting what remained of her arms of the bed, was just scratching the surface of what she was dealing with. She was suffering immensely mentally as well. Over the last three months her independence had been striped from her, and she was completely dependent on the aid of the hospital staff and her therapists. The therapists working with this patient showed the highest level of professionalism through communication and accountability.

Through my my journals and the time I’ve spent at Gardner Pilot Academy, I’ve noticed more and more the importance of developing good relations with students and fellow teachers. At the start of this program, I did not even consider the impact of relationships on learning. This may be because although relationships have a vital role on one's education, they are so commonplace in our lives they go unnoticed by students in the classroom. The impact of these relationships, though, is very noticable when teaching. While assisting Ms. Ramon with her classes, I not only saw the relationships she had with her students and how they created a more positive and productive environment, but also the impact of those relationships. During the first couple days I was assisting, I noticed she always expressed interested in her students and treated them with respect. Throughout the rest of my time, I continued to notice this, and have also observed how she makes students feel their contributions are welcomed and how she collaborates with fellow teachers. Experiencing her relationship building process has helped me develop my own relationships, both with students and teachers. Relationships are key in creating a productive and positive learning environment.

Academic: I am not sure in what manner I am mercy shower in regards to my current academic situation; however, I would like to be able to aide my fellow classmates as much as possible. Since, the classes I take are online I do not get to know my fellow classmates in the way I would if we were in a classroom setting. So, instead I try to pray for my online classmates, especially when I feel like an assignment may be stressful for everyone.

Please answer thoughtfully the following questions and then upload a Word document of your work here. Your total length should be about 400 words.

I am about ten years old in elementary school. The foundations that will dictate the rest of our educational career are embedded here. We’re all beginning to become self aware, realising we are separate entities from the others around us, although we haven’t quite understood what that means. We have also begun to wonder what our private parts are meant for and why they come in two different sets. We’re told about these “changes” that we’ll undergo in the next years, how our bodies will change and how we’ll come to resemble our mothers and fathers. In a class of 30 you can pick out four of the girls whose bodies have already begun to morph into something entirely different. I’m not among them, but I wonder about what I’ll turn into when my body starts changing. I am thin and tall with very long hair, but I don’t feel very pretty and I’ve convinced myself that I am not human because if I was then I would like the other girls in my class. The adults around me tell me I’ll grow into myself which isn’t a concept ten-year-old me can fathom and so the adults probably just feel sorry for little ugly me.

I attended 15 out of 15 sessions for the duration of this semester if there are fifteen sessions. Base on the ilearn there are only 11 sessions, and the only meeting that we missed was the air quality issue from the fire in Sonoma County. In the past I have always contacted my peers to take down the necessary notes that I missed; however, I have not had to do this for this semester.

Being ENGL 1301 a core course requisite for graduation, usually, students tend to enroll in the class just because they have to. In my case, I was always excited for this class, even before I had registered for it. I had been wishing for the time I was going to be able to take it. Additionally, I had been anxious to take this class because I thought that it would be a great opportunity to learn more about the writing and reading in this country and to improve those skills as well. Throughout my life, I have always been interested in writing, but I had to learn how to write accordingly to the standards of the U.S. Unfortunately, when I started taking this class, with another professor, it was not as I expected. I realized that the instructor was more interested in students who had a high level of writing skills than those students who were still seeking to improve their writing and reading skills.

Today, students were instructed to come in and draw a pictures to represent themselves based on their physical attributes or interests. I joined in as well. After this morning work, we all gathered around the carpet in the floor and shared what we drew and explained how it described us. This was such a cool get to know activity and allowed students to express themselves in a fun way. After, they had a vocabulary quiz later in the days so students were allowed to create flash cards in order to partner study. Again, this is a great idea to gets kids involved in learning, using a different activity to get the information across. I am starting to observe that most of Mrs. Prioreschi’s students are kinesthetic learners, who learn from hands on experiences and moving.