BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
FIELD EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
Advisor Meeting Minutes
September 10, 2014
1. Welcome Back and Introductions
· Introduced two new advisors who were hired for Charles River campus: Milly Arbaje-Thomas and Melissa Barbosa.
Milly most recently worked at ABCD in Boston where she supervised many social work interns in the 20 years she worked there. Melissa is a graduate of our Fall River campus program and works at Stoughton Youth Commission where she has also supervised social work students from BUSSW and other area schools.
· Introduced Mary Collins, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, who has been in the position since July 2014 when Ruth Freedman retired. Mary has been a professor in the Policy Department and is also the chair of that department.
2. Updates
· Three new full-time faculty members were hired in the Macro and Policy Departments. Geoff Wilkinson was hired in the non-tenure position in macro that had been occupied by Lee Staples who retired in the spring. Geoff has most recently been working at the Department of Public Health and has been both an adjunct classroom instructor and field instructor for BUSSW. Linda Sprague Martinez, also in the Macro Department, is in a tenure track position. Her background and research interests are in community health and she was most recently teaching and doing research at Tufts. Tom Byrne is in the Policy Department in a tenure track position. His research interests are in homelessness, especially with the veteran population. He will present some of his research at our January advising meeting so you will have a chance to meet him and also earn CECs.
· Field Education Department Administrative Position
Alicia Cameron is our temporary administrative assistant and was introduced at the meeting. We are in the process of interviewing candidates for the permanent position and hope to hire someone by early to mid-October.
· Placements
All of the foundation year students are placed, both clinical and macro. Most students begin placement this week.
· The Health Care Orientation on August 14 for advanced year clinical students was very successful. Attending the orientation were approximately 55 students from six local MSW programs who are doing internships at seven of the teaching hospitals: Beth Israel, Brigham & Women’s, Children’s, Dana Farber, Mass General and the Bedford and Boston/Brockton VAMCs. The committee of people who worked on this orientation will make some revisions and plan to offer it again next year and hope to expand the opportunity to students interning at other area hospitals.
· There have been some changes in foundation year clinical courses. In the first semester, the CP759 course (taken by all students who are in field) has been restructured and will meet for 3 hours/week for 7 weeks with an additional 9 hours of outside class activities and assignments to be completed as part of the course. Clinical students will then take one of the three required CP770s in the latter half of the fall semester. The CP770 series has been restructured to meet for 3 hours/week for 7 weeks. Students can elect to take whichever of the three courses they choose in the fall and the other two in the series in the spring semester. Macro students may elect to take one of the CP770 courses in the fall but it is not required.
· Seminar for new field instructors – This year we are offering one macro and two clinical sections of the SIFI at Charles River, another clinical section in the community at Bay Cove Human Services, and one at the Fall River campus. There are no seminars being offered at Chelmsford or on the Cape this year. We also have 45 field instructors scheduled to take the online version. Most of these are field instructors across the country although we have offered it to local people who cannot attend the face-to-face version.
· Reminder – we have changed the number of required process recordings/analyses to 12 per semester rather than 2 per week. However, if a field instructor requires more than 12, we will support that requirement. In addition, students will write a reflection piece at the end of each semester on how their field assignments demonstrate some of the competencies. (The description of the assignment and an example of a reflection piece was emailed to you in the past month.) These reflections should be given to you, the advisor, and you can give the student feedback on what s/he has written. The reason for asking you to review the reflection piece is to take some of the burden off of the field instructors, to help you know more about what the student is learning, and to help students think about the competencies especially in preparation for the midyear and final evaluations. We will talk more about the reflection assignment at the next advisors meeting in October.
3. Early Advising Vignettes
For the remainder of the meeting advisors met in small groups to discuss some prepared “typical” advising questions and scenarios that you might encounter in the beginning of the year.
Next Advisors meeting is October 8.