Narrative Statement: Immigrant And Diverse Community

Narrative Statement
1. My main objective in terms of my career path is to work with diverse communities, specifically I would like to become a caseworker and work with immigrant and refugee communities to help them gain access to services and feel at home in their community. I think it is important that in every branch of social work there are individuals who are compassionate towards diverse populations and experience working with individuals whose first language is not English. Because of this, I am interested in pursuing a graduate degree in Clinical Social Work. My undergraduate majors are English Literature and Spanish, which at first do not seem like areas of focus which would naturally lead me into a career in social work, but honestly
For the past four years, I have worked as a teaching assistant at the Child Development Center, a preschool on Berry College’s campus. This work experience has helped me become more competent working with people through my interactions with parents and teachers as well as through interactions with the preschoolers in my class. Working with very young children enhanced my ability to communicate because I have to find different ways to explain tasks in order to reach children at various levels of comprehension and ability. There were also some English language learning students from Asian and Eastern European backgrounds, and I had to learn quickly how to communicate with them in a way that would not make them feel isolated from the rest of the class. This struggle to communicate was highlighted just a few weeks ago when a new student from Russia joined our class. On his first day with us, I could not get him to move from his spot on the floor after naptime. I kept attempting to talk to him and to help the student roll up his cot, only to have him turn away every time I tried to speak with him. Needless to say, this was an extreme case of a child who spoke almost no English and who I later found common ground with after many failed attempts on my part to communicate. Working at the preschool has taught me that every individual has a unique set of skills and requires different things from the person assisting them, and when a strong foundation of communication has been
I worked as an intern for the legal department who were helping LSG’s refugee clients and other immigrants with their work permits, applications for green cards, and interviews, applications for naturalization, and provided fingerprinting services for DACA. During my internship there, I helped my work supervisor translate for some Cuban families who were preparing for their interviews with the DHS and at one point I even helped with the intake interview for one of their refugee clients. My background in Spanish allowed me to communicate fairly easily with the Cuban families, and our attempts to speak Spanish with them seemed to put the families at ease even though they also spoke English. However, since the other refugee client only spoke a little English and I did not speak any of the other languages he spoke, our interaction was more challenging and I learned more about how to navigate language barriers from this interaction. As much as I loved speaking Spanish with clients, this experience also made me realize that I needed more experience learning how to communicate with individuals who struggle with English when there is no translator present. In situations where there is a language barrier, it is sometimes difficult not to get discouraged or to feel embarrassed. However, this experience helped me learn to communicate because it taught me that