Experiences shape our path I would probably say that one of my formative experience is how a colleague and I constructed a narrative of our experiences at SSA that began with we’re the oldest students here, unsure of what classes to take, we could never be full time students, take more than 2 classes and/or work and attend classes—only to have some transformative moment or moments that then made us the social workers we are today. On the flip side, I feel like we all have this platonic ideal in our minds about passing all of our classes with grades higher than a “C,” and we expect, contrary to our own experiences and contrary to the experiences of some of the students in our cohort, is that not to stress ourselves, and do the very best we can. Unlike my colleague, my concern was graduating undergrad 30 years ago, coming to a prestigious discipline, and feeling inferior in my first year of not knowing how to write papers or conduct research. I came from a very small college, and had no preparation whatsoever in 30 years what school was about currently. Moreover, graduate school has given me the opportunity to apply a theoretical foundation to describe my own undergraduate experience—after spending four years going through college and witnessing my own development, I am now learning why I went through such development and how I can best help those develop and grow just as I did. SSA has removed all self-doubt, and helped me leap past my own assumptions of what I knew to be true and what I am capable of learning, feeling, experiencing, and doing.
Another formative change in my life was converting from Christianity to Islam. My belief, fear, and Islamic morality are the primary causes of my strength, character and virtue. I have learned to disregard the suggestions and criticisms of society, family, and friends and live my life according to the Holy Qur’an’s values and morality. Looking retrospectively to understand one’s past worldview is a difficult process. For me, it requires not only critical thought, but also the task of remembering how one made sense of and interpreted daily life events, a process with unavoidable limitations. It is a process of critical reflection, requiring a replay or review of the entire transformative learning experience. Nevertheless, it is an important exercise and one that can help to understand ourselves on a deeper level. This is important to me because I have learned about my personal and professional assumptions about clinical helping and their relationship to my own beliefs, values, past experiences, familiar and cultural background, and the larger societal and systems context of my life, and the types of clients I may have to work with.